Question

Jessica stands 150 feet from the base of a tall building. She measures the angle from her eye to the top of the building to be 84. If her eye level is 5 feet above the ground, how tall is the building

Answer 1

The datum level of this problem would be Jessica's eye level. If you visualize the diagram, it would create a right triangle. The base would be 150 feet and the opposite angle of the height is 84 degrees.

Using the tangent function:

tan84 = opposite side/adjacent side = h/150
h = 150*tan84
h = 1427.15 feet

The total height would be added with 5 since the height of the building must obviously start from the ground, not eye level.

h = 5 + 1427.15
h = 1432.15 ft