Help me with my homework? i'm pretty sure you're supposed to use radians or related knowledge but not sure..?

Question

oks, so i have a bunch of problems sorta like this:

find tan pi/6. you are not supposed to use a calculator. like when it said find cos 45degrees, i used the proportions of an isosceles right triangle...does anyone know how to do this? sorry about the crappy explanation

Answer 1

There are two special right triangles that it would be helpful to memorize.  They are:  An isosceles right triangle, or 45-45-90 degrees

and a 30-60-90 degrees right triangle.  Knowing the trigonometric values for the basic functions of these angles---30-45-60---is very helpful.

The next issue is to be able to convert degrees into radians and radians to degrees.  The most useful relation I know is that:

Pi radians equals 180 degrees

so your angle (pi/6 radians) is equal to 30 degrees

The tan(pi/6) = tan 30 = (sqrt 3)/3

I'm sure that there is some kind of table in your book giving the values for these special right triangles.  Find it.