Question

Amanda and Jeremiah are standing on the same side of a large lake. They are separated by a horizontal distance of 4000 ft. Both Amanda and Jeremiah can see a helicopter that is directly above the horizontal distance between them. Amanda’s angle of elevation to see the helicopter is 60 and Jeremiah’s angle of elevation to see it is 30. 1.What is the distance between Amanda and the helicopter?

Answer 1

Step-by-step explanation: First of all we need to know if our triangle is a right triangle (has one 90° inner angle) to be able to use the law of sines to calculate the distance between Amanda and the helicopter.

Step 1: Once we know that the sum of all inner angles of a triangle is equal to 180° we can calculate the unknown angle as follows

As we can see above the missing inner angle is 90° which means it is a right triangle.

Step 2: Now we can use the law of sines as follows

once sin (90°) = 1 and sin (30°) = 0.5, let's calculate "x" below

`\begin{gathered} (x)/(sin(30))=(4000)/(sin90) \\ x=(4000*0.5)/(1) \\ x=2000ft \end{gathered}`

Final answer: As we can see above, the final answer is 2000 ft