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Thursday, April 17, 2014

BQ #2: Unit T Intro

1-How do the trig graphs relate to the Unit Circle?
A) Period?-Why is the period for sine and cosine 2 pi, whereas the period for tangent and cotangent is pi?
The reason why the period for sine and cosine is 2 pi is because in the unit circle it takes them the whole 360 degrees in order to repeat it's pattern. For example for sine in the first and second quadrants it is positive but in the third and fourth quadrants it is negative so in order to see the pattern repeat one must wait until another 2 pi goes around. While for tangent it only takes pi because in the unit circle it is positive in the first quadrant and negative in the second allowing the pattern to repeat itself again in the next two quadrants. If unclear (for visual) look at the picture below.
B) Amplitude?-How does the fact of that sine and cosine have amplitudes of one relate to what we know about the Unit Circle?
Sine and cosine equaling to one is related to the unit circle because they both can be between 1 and -1 because of their trig functions we used in the Unit Circle before (sin=y/r and cos=x/r). While the other functions don't have amplitudes because of the fact that they don't have restriction. For example, tan=y/x because of this tan can be equal to anything that can be inside and outside the Unit Circle.

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