Question

Suppose you are standing on the edge of a canyon that is 400 meters high, where two sides of the canyon are at the same height and the walls of the canyon are perfectly vertical. The angle of depression to the bottom of the other side of the canyon is 14.3 degrees. Find the distance to the other side of the canyon. Ignore the height in the computations.

Answer 1

Set up a right triangle. the height is one side of triangle, its length is 400.
The angle opposite to the 400 is 14.3 degrees. The adjacent side is distance across, "x"

Use tangent ratio

`tan(14.3) = (400)/(x)`


`x = (400)/(tan (14.3))`