According to legend, Galileo used the Leaning Tower of Pisa to conduct his experiments on the laws of gravity. When he dropped objects from the top of the 55-meter tower (measured length, not height, of tower), they landed 4.8 meters from the towers base. To the nearest degree. What is the angle that the tower leans form the ground?

Question

Mathematics

Maya Dunn

16 June, 12:48

According to legend, Galileo used the Leaning Tower of Pisa to conduct his experiments on the laws of gravity. When he dropped objects from the top of the 55-meter tower (measured length, not height, of tower), they landed 4.8 meters from the towers base. To the nearest degree. What is the angle that the tower leans form the ground?

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Answers (1)

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Frida Blevins · Answer 1

85 degrees

Step-by-step explanation:

To know the angle of the tower, we need to use the tower's length and the distance the object landed from the tower base to create a triangle, where the hypotenuse is the first one (55) and one cathetus is the other (4.8). The other cathetus is the tower height.

To know the angle that the tower leans from the ground, we know that its cossine will be 4.8 over 55 (adjacent cathetus over hypotenusa), so:

cos (angle) = 4.8/55 = 0.0873 - > angle = 85 degrees