Question

A wire, 24 meters in length, is attached from the top of a post to a stake in the ground. The measure of the angle that the wire makes with the ground is 36° Find to the nearest senth of a meter the distance from the stake to the foot of the post

Answer 1

given the information on the problem, we can draw the following diagram:

then, we can use the cosine function to find the distance from the stake to the foot of the post:

$\begin{gathered} \cos (36)=\frac{\text{adjacent side}}{hypotenuse}=\frac{x}{24} \\ \Rightarrow x=24\cdot\cos (36)=19.4 \\ x=19.4 \end{gathered}$

therefore, the distance is 19.4 m