SOLUTION: Alayna is trying to determine the angle at which to aim her sprinkler nozzle to water the top of a 5 ft bush in her yard. Assuming the water takes a straight path and the sprinkler

Question 1159153: Alayna is trying to determine the angle at which to aim her sprinkler nozzle to water the top of a 5 ft bush in her yard. Assuming the water takes a straight path and the sprinkler is on the ground 4 ft from the bush, at what angle of inclination should she set it?
Answer by jsmallt9(3759) (Show Source): You can put this solution on YOUR website!
There is a right triangle in this problem. The vertices are the top of the bush, and, on the ground, the sprinkler and the base of the bush. The right angle is the angle between the bush and the ground.
From the perspective of the angle where the sprinkler is, the angle of inclination, the height of the bush is the opposite side and the side from the sprinkler to the base of the bush would be the adjacent side.
Since we know the opposite and adjacent sides of this triangle, we can use a tan (or cot or inverse tan or inverse cot equation to solve this problem. Since we're looking for an angle we'll use an inverse function and since our calculator (probably) does not have an inverse cot button, we will use inverse tan:
angle =
Entering this into our calculator we should get approx. 51.3 degrees or 0.896 radians.
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