Wednesday, July 28, 2010

Trigonometry

Here are the answers to the Geometry questions from the previous post. They weren't too hard, so hopefully you got them both right!

Sure. In fact, if it had one right angle, it would have to have two of them. Otherwise none of the sides would he parallel.

Here we get into a bit of difficulty. I can't see how to draw that. When I try, I obtain a rectangle. Then both pairs of opposite sides are parallel and I no longer have a trapezoid.

The next book in line is Life of Fred Trigonometry. What is trigonometry, you ask? The author states the following about trig at the beginning of the book,

"Trigonometry plays with triangles. Mostly right triangles. Trigon means triangle and metry means measuring (in Greek). someone probably stuck the "o" in trigon-o-metry to make it easier to pronounce."
There are 10 chapters on Trig covering things like: sine, cosine, tangent, trig functions, radians, oblique triangles and much more.

There are also 6 "Looking Back" chapters that cover things that the student has learned previously.

In this book, there is also one "Looking Forward" chapter at the end of the book which looks ahead to Calculus.

Overall, there is a very thorough coverage of trigonometry as well as other things, like Shakespeare, saltimbocca and boxing.

The Trig book also comes with a Home Companion book that breaks all of the chapters up into 94 daily lesson plans. Since this book might not take you an entire year to complete, you can always start the Calculus book early since there are 24 chapters in that book!

Sorry, no questions today, as it is getting more difficult to find questions and answers that I can actually type into this box and have them come out right! You'll just have to take my word for it: If you're ready for Trig, this is an excellent book to get!