Question

In order to estimate the height of a building, two students stand at a certain distance from the building at street level. from this point, they find the angle of elevation from the street to the top of the building to be 39°. they then move 300 feet closer to the building and find the angle of elevation to be 50°. assuming that the street is level, estimate the height of the building to the nearest foot

Answer 1

Let h represent the height of the building. Then the difference between the two angle measurement locations is
.. h/tan(39°) -h/tan(50°) = 300 ft
.. h = (300 ft)/(1/tan(39°) -1/tan(50°))
.. h ≈ 758 ft

The height of the building is about 758 feet.