The New Job Applicant

You listed on your resume that you have little to no experience with trig. This will be a problem if you were to work in construction with our company.

When would I need trig in construction?

Take this example from one of our companies unfinished projects. These two poles are for a clothesline. The angle of elevation between them is 10 degrees and the distance is 25 feet. What is the lenght of wire needed to finish the clothesline.

I don't know.

It is actually quite simple. In this problem you need to find the hypotenuse of a right triangle using an angle and a side lenght. You can use this equation, H=a/cos(theta). If you substitue this problems values into this equation you get H=25/cos(10). Simplifying this equation creates approximately 25.4 feet.

He is yet another example. The sloped section of the roof of this house was built with 4 meter long boards. We needed the peak of the roof to be 2 meters higher than the starting point. What angle of elevation did we need to use to accomplish this?

...

Its simple. We can view this as a right triangle for which we know 2 sides, the hypotenuse and a side. The angle we need is opposite the non-hypotenuse side so using Soh-Cah-Toa I know the sin function is applicable. For this problem however, we will take the inverse sin of sin^-1 of 2/4. This gives us 30 degrees. therefore the angle of elevation neccesary is 30 degrees.

You listed on your resume that you have little to no experience with trig. This will be a problem if you were to work in construction with our company.

When would I need trig in construction?

Take this example from one of our companies unfinished projects. These two poles are for a clothesline. The angle of elevation between them is 10 degrees and the distance is 25 feet. What is the lenght of wire needed to finish the clothesline.

I don't know.

It is actually quite simple. In this problem you need to find the hypotenuse of a right triangle using an angle and a side lenght. You can use this equation, H=a/cos(theta). If you substitue this problems values into this equation you get H=25/cos(10). Simplifying this equation creates approximately 25.4 feet.

He is yet another example. The sloped section of the roof of this house was built with 4 meter long boards. We needed the peak of the roof to be 2 meters higher than the starting point. What angle of elevation did we need to use to accomplish this?

...

Its simple. We can view this as a right triangle for which we know 2 sides, the hypotenuse and a side. The angle we need is opposite the non-hypotenuse side so using Soh-Cah-Toa I know the sin function is applicable. For this problem however, we will take the inverse sin of sin^-1 of 2/4. This gives us 30 degrees. therefore the angle of elevation neccesary is 30 degrees.

You listed on your resume that you have little to no experience with trig. This will be a problem if you were to work in construction with our company.

When would I need trig in construction?