I am currently learning trigonometry for GCSE and I am trying to make sense out of it. However, I am struggling to do so.
I understand how to find a missing length or a missing angle but the thing I don’t really understand is how all these rules work.
I recently found out what sin, cos and tan actually mean. They are the percentages of one side to another side. For example, sin is the percentage of the length opposite side to the length of the hypotenuse. Correct me if I am wrong here, but this is what I believe to be true and I understand this part to an extent.
What I do not understand at all however are the graphs for sin, cos and tan. I understand the first part of the graphs which go from 1 degrees to 81 degrees. However, once it gets to 90 degrees, that’s the part I can’t seem to get my head around.
As you know, trigonometry is in right angled triangles. This means the maximum size of one of the other angles is 89 degrees (meaning that the other angle must be 1 degrees). But with that being said, how do the trigonometric graphs go from 1 - 360 degrees. It doesn’t make sense to me.
If you had a right angled triangle with another angle at 90 degrees or more, then it wouldn’t make a triangle since triangles only go up to 180 degrees.
I hope I have made my point clear. Please try to respond to my question in simple words seen as I am not very advanced in trigonometry yet (as you can see). Thank you!
