SOLUTION: I'm not really understanding sine, cosine, and tangent. How do you know which one to use, and when? and how do you keep straight hypotoneuse and adjacents? Seems to me their alwa

Question 386499: I'm not really understanding sine, cosine, and tangent. How do you know which one to use, and when? and how do you keep straight hypotoneuse and adjacents? Seems to me their always different.
Found 2 solutions by Alan3354, richard1234:
Answer by Alan3354(69443) (Show Source): You can put this solution on YOUR website!
Look up the unit circle.
Hypotenuse is always the long side.
Adjacent to an angle is next to it.
Side opposite an angle means that side doesn't form the angle.

Answer by richard1234(7193) (Show Source): You can put this solution on YOUR website!
You can do sine, cosine, tangent measurements of an angle less than 90 degrees using right triangles using the three definitions:

where a is the segment opposite the angle x, b is the segment "adjacent" to x but not the hypotenuse, and c is the hypotenuse (always note that the hypotenuse is the side opposite the right angle).

The most general way to do sine, cosine, tangent is to consider a circle graphed in the xy-plane that has radius 1 (called the unit circle). For some point on the circle, we can determine the angle from the x-axis given that counterclockwise motion denotes a positive angle. The sine of the angle is the y-coordinate of the point, and the cosine of the angle is the x-coordinate. It is easy to see afterward that the Pythagorean identity is verified:

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