The angle of depression of a point on the ground from the top of a building is 20.3o. If the foot of the building is 40m, calculate the height of the buildi...
The angle of depression of a point on the ground from the top of a building is 20.3o. If the foot of the building is 40m, calculate the height of the building, correct to one decimal place
Answer Details
In this problem, we can use trigonometry to determine the height of the building.
Let h be the height of the building and d be the distance from the point on the ground to the foot of the building. We can see that the angle of depression is the angle between the line of sight from the top of the building to the point on the ground and the horizontal line. Therefore, we can draw a right-angled triangle with the height of the building, the distance from the point on the ground to the foot of the building, and the line of sight from the top of the building to the point on the ground as the sides.
From the triangle, we can use the tangent function since we have the opposite and adjacent sides. Therefore:
tan(20.3°) = h/40
h = 40 tan(20.3°) ≈ 14.8m
Therefore, the height of the building is approximately 14.8m.
The correct answer is 14.8m.