Question: A baseball player throws a ball at 80 miles per hour at a 30 degree angle. How far can the ball travel, assuming it is caught by someone at the same hight it was thrown?
Question: How tall is the Bennington Monument? We measure the angle we made from us to the monument--it's 15 degrees. On flat land, even with the monument, we walk 75 feet towards the monument, then measure the elevation again. Angle of elevation is now 18.5 degrees.
Question: There's a Fire! Fire towers are set up with known distances between them. For a reason. Two fire towers are set up 30 km apart. Degrees used ... 54 degrees and 61 degrees ... how far away is the fire?
This sets us up for the more general Law of Sines.
Question: Baseball Diamond. From pitcher to home: 66.5 ft. Home to base: 90 ft. (it's a 90' square) Distance to first from mound? Unknown
This sets up for Law of Cosines
We have two major tools at our disposal; the Law of Sines and the Law of Cosines.
It all depends what pieces of information we've been given in order for us to solve them.