Sunday, October 25, 2009

Stephen's Reflection

Ok this week was all trig...fun!! (not really). But anyway i think the easiest stuff was writing degrees as ' and ", converting to radians, and converting to degrees. So i guess i will talk about that. The first one im going to talk about is writing degrees as ' and ".
Ex:
write 12.3 degrees as ' and ".
what you do first is separate the numbers before and after the decimal and multiply everything after the decimal by 60
-12 degrees (.3 x 60)
Then your answer would be 12 degrees 18'
*if you multiplied the decimal by 60 and it gave you another decimal number then you would do the same thing as before but you would put " after the answer

Now to convert to radians:
Ex:
36 degrees converted to radians
first you multiply the degrees by pi/180
so you would divide 36 by 180 and you would get a decimal and then you want to convert it to a fraction.
your answer would be 1/5 pi or pi/5

Now to convert to degrees:
Ex:
3pi/4
multiply 3pi/4 x 180/pi..both pi's will cancel
then multiply 3 x 180 all over 4
then your answer would be 135 degrees

Some stuff i will have trouble with is remembering the unit circle and remembering the trig chart. I can remember the degrees part of the unit circle but with the parts with pi but i guess thats kinda my responsibility to remember it but if someone can just help me with it in class or stuff i would be thankful.

1 comment:

  1. I discovered an easier way to memorize the chart
    First you would have to set up the chart differently than it was given
    It would have to look like this
    Sin Cos Tan Csc Sec Cot
    30
    45
    60
    90
    Just like a graph and then you fill in the parts for each
    If you can memorize the sin column for the chart you can figure out the rest of the chart
    Cos is just sin backwards
    Tan is just sin/cos
    Csc is just 1/sin
    Etc. You just have to find and remember the relations the relations

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