Question

A kite on a 160-foot string is caught on a pole. When the full length of the string is stretched in a straight line to the ground, it touches the ground a distance of 50 feet from the bottom of the pole. The string forms an angle of _______° with the ground when it is stretched like this

Answer 1

Attatched is a diagram that I've made of the triangle formed by the kite, the ground and the pole. So, we are trying to find angle CAB. Notice that we know the side adjacent to the angle and the hypotenuse, so we can use cosine:

`image`

The string forms an angle of 71.79 degrees with the ground.