Guess whose back? Soh, Cah and Toa are! and they brought a few friends, named Cho, Sha and Cao! Now unless you slept through a whole unit of last year's math, you should know what soh cah toa is, basic trigonometry. If you have a right triangle with an angle of 21 degrees and a hypotenuse of 12cm, you can easily find the length of the side opposite to the angle.
But, enough of that baby stuff! Time to kick it up a notch. Going by the same principles as soh cah toa, you can probably guess what we do with cho sha cao.
Exact Same Thing! Of course, we have been introduced with some new words, so let's check those out.
c in cho = cosecant
s in sha = secant
c in cao = cotangent
Moving past the first letters in cho sha cao are the final two letters in each word and just like soh cah toa, these letters stand for
o = opposite
h = hypotenuse
a = adjacent
But Arnold, if these different terms stand for the same thing, what's the difference?
I can answer that question with one unnecessarily big word...
RECIPROCATION!
or the whirly bird as I call it.
Cosecant is the reciprocal of sine
Secant is the reciprocal of cosine
Cotangent is the reciprocal of tangent
And that is about as far as we got today! hope you enjoyed the blog! Glad to be the guinea pig for this daily class blog concept :)
See ya next time!
