Trig Functions

I'm actually writing this on Friday night, but I'm setting the post time for Saturday, so whatever. It counts. I had a thought, so I thought I'd think about the thought before I forgot it.

Ok, so I'm taking the ACT in two weeks (really? yikes stripes!), just so I can hopefully get a better score on the math section (the second of five, there's also English, Reading and Science sections). If I don't... I have to take Intermediate Algebra in college, which besides covering stuff I already know (having just finished my Algebra 2 book), costs money without giving me any credit. Blech. I really shouldn't be that worried, I'm pretty sure I have enough trigonometry to get a good score, but I'm the kind of person who gets nervous about it anyway. I need to work on that.

Anyway, I'm brushing up on my trigonometry for the test, since that's what I had no clue about when I first took the test. Most of my knowledge of trig comes from my Physics book, which didn't help me a whole lot with knowing when to use which, since the book told me what situations use which. Oh well. I can't remember very well what kind of trig questions are on the test, since I hadn't the foggiest idea what they were talking about every time that came up, I just picked whichever circle I liked. Oh well. So anyway, the trigonometric functions tell you the ratio of the sides of a right triangle. That doesn't seem all that useful right away, does it? Anyway, you take an angle, and you apply a function to it, which gives you the same ratio as if you'd divided the lengths of two certain sides of the triangle. So there's sine, cosine and tangent, and a few others that I have no clue about and have never heard of before. We'll skip those. I don't even remember their names. At any rate, the sine of an angle gives you the ratio between the opposite and hypotenuse sides of the angle, the cosine gives you the ratio between the adjacent and hypotenuse sides, and tangent gives you opposite and adjacent. There are only two angles in a given triangle to do this to, what with a right triangle having a right angle and all.

They used to have charts for all of this, now they use calculators. Now, the ACT says all of the math problems can be solved without use of a calculator, though it can speed things up to have one, so I won't really have to use any of these numbers in a problem -- which is really too bad because that's what I know how to do. Instead I have to remember what I just said above, which I probably won't be able to remember. I guess that's why I'm writing it down, so I can remember a little better. I'm weird like that. I really hope I do ok on my Pre-Calculus, even though right now in the middle of my winter funk I don't care about much. But as long as I do ok on my ACT I guess it doesn't matter much how I do on my Pre-Calculus... well, it does a little. It could be interesting. If I don't get myself confused I may just move on after the trig sections, instead of going back to the beginning. I just finished Algebra 2, I don't really feel like going through three quarters of that again starting next week. Is that unreasonable? I hope not, because I'm skipping to chapter 4 or 6 or something, where the trig is.