Kaplan trig

[surge]

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OK, here's a question, and I hope I'm just being stupid....

In Kaplan's MCAT Comprehensive Review (6th edition) they keep offering solutions to problems involving finding angles simply by literaly evaluating the trig functions (inverse), for angles that are not the standard 0,30,45,60,90 and 180 deg.

In other words, for example, a solution calls for an angle, so they express tanX=1.23, and then matter-of-factly say therefore X=51deg....
That's all nice and dandy, except that you can't use a calculator on the MCAT.

Does anyone know something I don't, i.e. how to do these calculations by hand. If not, Kaplan's solutions are pretty useless...

Here are couple of specific examples:

p.612, figure 1.3
p.737, figure 10.7
p.738, figure 10.8


Any thoughts?

Serge

 

[uffda]

I don't have the book so cannot help you - maybe you could post the whole question, all of the answer choices and describe the diagram?

 

[tsman]

From all I've read and heard, you only need to know the basic values, 0, 30, 45, 60, 90, 180...if that. I'd be curious to hear from some who have taken the real one though.
If they don't give you the value for an obscure value, I would assume just rounding to somewhere in between and hope the answers are well distributed.

ts