SOLUTION: A rectangular piece of of plywood 4.00ft by 8.00ft is cut from one corner to an opposite corner. what are the angles between edges of the resulting piece?

Question 624357: A rectangular piece of of plywood 4.00ft by 8.00ft is cut from one corner to an opposite corner. what are the angles between edges of the resulting piece?
Answer by jsmallt9(3758) (Show Source): You can put this solution on YOUR website!
Since we started with a rectangle, the "resulting piece" is a right triangle with legs of 4 and 8 feet. TO find the acute angles in this right triangle we will use the two sides we know and an Trig function wthat would have those two sides in its ratio.

Let's start with the angle that has the 8 ft side. Let's call this angle A. From the point of view of angle A, the 8 ft side is the adjacent side and the 4 ft side is the opposite side. Which Trig functions have opposite and adjacent in their ratios? Answer: tan and cot. And since our calculator probably does not have a button for cot, we will use tan.

Since tan is opposite over adjacent the equation we will use is:

So A is the acute angle whose tan is 1/2. For this we use the inverse tan button, , button:
Making sure the calculator is working in degree mode and entering:

You should get A = 26.56505118

For the other angle, let's call it B, we can use

Or we could just use the fact that the three angle must add up to 180:
B = 180 - 90 - 26.56505118
Either way we should get B = 63.43494882
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