How To Find The Angle Of A Triangle Using Tangent

Sine cosine and tangent often shortened to sin cos and tan are each a ratio of sides of a right angled triangle.

How to find the angle of a triangle using tangent. To find the angle measurement you need to use the inverse tangent or arctangent function on the calculator. The tangent ratio is not only used to identify a ratio between two sides of a right triangle but it can also be used to find a missing side length. If you know or can measure the opposite and adjacent sides of the triangle you can compute the unknown angle. In any right triangle the tangent of an angle is the length of the opposite side o divided by the length of the adjacent side a.

Step 1 find which two sides we know out of opposite adjacent and hypotenuse. This tutorial shows you how to use the tangent ratio to find that missing measurement. Divide the length of one side by another side. Searching for the missing side or angle in a right triangle using trigonometry.

Sine cosine and tangent. Using the tangent function to find the angle of a right triangle the lesson the tangent functionrelates a given angleto the oppositeside and adjacentside of a right triangle. It is called tangent since it can be represented as a line segment tangent to a circle. Locate the longest side of the triangle.

Our tool is also a safe bet. The tangent function along with sine and cosine is one of the three most common trigonometric functions. Calculating the angle requires that you use either the inverse sine inverse cosine or inverse tangent function on a calculator. For a given angle o each ratio stays the same no matter how big or small the triangle is.

Divide both sides by the tan 80 degrees to get. This function is often abbreviated tan 1. Type 2 3 given values in the second part of the calculator and in a blink of an eye youll find the answer. If you want to find the values of sine cosine tangent and their reciprocal functions use the first part of the calculator.

Multiply both sides by the unknown x to get x tan 80 degrees 39. Step 3 for sine calculate oppositehypotenuse for cosine calculate adjacenthypotenuse or for tangent calculate oppositeadjacent. Label this side as the hypotenuse. Tangent function tan x the tangent is a trigonometric function defined as the ratio of the length of the side opposite to the angle to the length of the adjacent side in a right angled triangle.

In a formula it is written simply as tan. Selecting the right function will depend on which sides have their length specified and which angle in the triangle you must find. The wire attaches to the ground about 688 feet from the base of the tower to form the 80 degree angle. The angle labelled o is given by the formula below.