Angles Of Elevation & Depression

SOHCAHTOA, Pythagoras, sine rule and cosine rule and all things trigonometry actually have a lot of uses in “real life”.

Such as working out distances to things, heights of buildings and mountains, navigation at sea. An important part of “useful” trigonometry are angles of elevation and depression. If you’re standing and looking up at an object, the angle from your horizontal line of sight up to the object is the angle of elevation.

Whereas if you’re looking down at an object, the angle between your horizontal sight line and the object is known as the angle of depression. People often make a mistake as to which angle is the angle of depression, so be careful with it.

We then use all of our trigonometry skills to solve problems including angles of elevation and depression.