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• When a person looks at something above his or her location, the angle between the line
of sight and the horizontal is called the angle of elevation. In this case, the line of sight
is “elevated” above the horizontal.
• When a person looks at something below his or her location, the angle between the line
of sight and the horizontal is called the angle of depression. In this case, the line of
sight is “depressed” below the horizontal.
Since the vertical and horizontal directions are perpendicular, the elements of problems dealing
with the relationship between lines of sight and the horizontal lead naturally to right triangles:
horizontal
angle of
depression
angle of
elevation horizontal
Example: A person stands at the window of a building so that his eyes are 12.6 m above the
level ground in the vicinity of the building. An object is 58.5 m away from the building on a line
directly beneath the person. Compute the angle of depression of the person’s line of sight to the
object on the ground.
58.5
Here we’ve shown two commonly used notations, arctan and tan-1, for the inverse tangent
function. Thus, the angle of depression of the line of sight to the object is 12.150 rounded to two
decimal places.
16.9
tanθ =
27.5
so that
16.9
θ = tan−1 ≅ 31.57
0
27.5
Thus, to two decimal places, the angle of elevation of this person’s line of sight is 31.570.