Question

An engineer stands 200 feet from a tower and sights the top of the tower at a 45° angle of elevation. Find the height of the tower.

Answer 1

Drawing a diagram of a triangle may be helpful. The hypotenuse is irrelevant, but the vertical leg and the horizontal leg are useful. Since we know the engineer is looking up at a 45 degree angle from a distance of 200 feet, we can label the vertical leg the "opposite", since it is on the opposite side of the angle we are given. The horizontal leg then becomes the "adjacent". You can then use trigonometry to solve for the opposite. 
The options are:
sin(theta)= opposite/hypotenuse
cos(theta)= adjacent/hypotenuse
tan(theta)= opposite/adjacent
Since we don't care about the hypotenuse, the last equation is the one to use. The angle we are given can be substituted in for theta:
tan(45)= x/200
1.61977519= x/200
x= 323.955038 feet