# Prelim - Kinematics and Trigonometry (1 Viewer)

#### rosegazing

##### New Member
(I can't find a Year 11 Physics page so I thought I should ask here)

I'm stuck on a bunch of questions asking me to find horizontal and vertical components of each vector. Each question just has a diagonal line with a value (e.g. 12ms-1) and I'm pretty sure that you can't do any sort of trig to find out any other value if you only have one value in the first place. At the moment I am just measuring the angle with a protractor and going from there.

<-- here's and example: the green arrow is the resultant vector of x and y, find x and y

All the example questions have other values (angles or other sides/vectors).
Any help would be very much appreciated!!

Edit: Yeah turns out the teacher just didn't put the activity together properly and when I asked her she just said "oh it looks like around 45 degrees... just go with something like that". Measuring it was more accurate so thats how I'm gonna hand it in. Thanks unorganised distance ed

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#### yleming

##### New Member
When given the resultant vector, $\bg_white R$, and the smallest angle, $\bg_white \theta$, the horizontal component, $\bg_white R_{x}$, is $\bg_white R \cos \theta$, and the vertical component, $\bg_white R_{y}$, is $\bg_white R \sin \theta$.