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Jared is standing 12 feet from a rock-climbing wall. When he looks up to see his friend ascend the wall, the angle of elevation is 56°. How high up the wall is his friend?

Answer 1

#17.8 ft#

Let's draw a diagram so we can visualise what's going on here.

We want to find x. We know the adjacent side to the angle of elevation, but not the hypotenuse. Remember SOH CAH TOA. From this we can see that the appropriate trig function is tangent.

#tan(56) = x/12#

#x = 12tan(56) = 17.8 ft#

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Answer 2

Zoe Austin

His friend is approximately 9.8 feet up the wall.

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Answer from HIX Tutor

When evaluating a one-sided limit, you need to be careful when a quantity is approaching zero since its sign is different depending on which way it is approaching zero from. Let us look at some examples.