A surveyor walks 500m up a hill which slopes at an angle of 30o. Calculate the vertical height through which he rises
Answer Details
The vertical height through which the surveyor rises can be calculated using trigonometry. When a person walks up a hill, they are moving in two dimensions: horizontally and vertically. We can use a right triangle to represent this movement, where the horizontal distance is one side, the vertical distance is another side, and the slope of the hill is the angle between these sides.
In this case, the horizontal distance is 500m and the angle is 30 degrees, so we can use the trigonometric function sine to find the vertical distance:
sin(30) = vertical distance / 500
Multiplying both sides by 500, we get:
500 * sin(30) = vertical distance
Using a calculator, we can find that sin(30) = 0.5, so:
500 * 0.5 = 250
Therefore, the vertical height through which the surveyor rises is 250m.