Height of a tower.
You are looking at a tower from a distance, when you are told that the angle of elevation for that tower from the point where you are standing at is 45˚. You walk a mere fifty metres in a straight line towards the tower, and are then told that the angle of elevation is equal to 60˚. How tall is the tower?
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1 solution
So we know that the distance between the first point and the last point is fifty metres. We also know that this will form a right angled triangle. So, we should now look at the two angles, 45˚ and 60˚. The cotangent of 60 is 1 . 7 3 2 1 and that the cotangent for 45˚ is 1 1 . Therefore, as per trigonometry, fifty metres should equal to the height of the tower, or X multiplied by 1 . 7 3 2 1 . 7 3 2 − 1 . Therefore, the height of the tower is 118.301 metres.