Today Matthew and I discussed applications of trigonometry. We discussed angles of elevation and depression. Matthew answered questions like, "If a fire started 8 miles from the base of a mountain has a 14 degree angle of elevation to the top of the mountain, how tall is the mountain?" I encouraged Matthew to set up a drawing to visualize the scenario. He saw this created a triangle and then recognized that we could use the tangent function to set up an equation and solve for a missing side. Matthew set up tan14=x/8 and used inverse operations to solve. Matthew and I practiced a few more problems using this method.