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Right triangles and trigonometry SAT question

Math · Geometry and Trigonometry · Hard · Answer it here, explanation included.

In triangle , and angle is a right angle. What is the value of ?

Enter a number or fraction (like 3/17 or 0.176). Press Enter to check.

ExplanationShow

The correct answer is . It's given that angle is the right angle in triangle . Therefore, the acute angles of triangle  are angle and angle . The hypotenuse of a right triangle is the side opposite its right angle. Therefore, the hypotenuse of triangle is side . The cosine of an acute angle in a right triangle is the ratio of the length of the side adjacent to the angle to the length of the hypotenuse. It's given that . This can be written as . Since the cosine of angle is a ratio, it follows that the length of the side adjacent to angle is and the length of the hypotenuse is , where is a constant. Therefore, and . The Pythagorean theorem states that in a right triangle, the square of the length of the hypotenuse is equal to the sum of the squares of the lengths of the other two sides. For triangle , it follows that . Substituting for and for yields . This is equivalent to . Subtracting  from each side of this equation yields . Taking the square root of each side of this equation yields . Since , it follows that , which can be rewritten as . Note that 15/17, .8824, .8823, and 0.882 are examples of ways to enter a correct answer.

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