Monthly Archives: April 2014

Tangent Line and Circle Problems

I will categorize this post as “sometimes you just need a worksheet”.  #SYJNAW for my twitter peeps.

I have always kind of disliked teaching the circles unit in geometry because of all the different rules – tangent / secant angles, chord-chord sides, chord-chord angles, blah blah.  This year I put together a learning segment on circles that involved satellites in geostationary orbit.  It was based on my experiences working at Lockheed Martin and my engineering background.  I will write about it when I have time.  But for now I will just attach a couple worksheets I made of problems that I put on a homework, or threw in a test. I figured I would just share these, because you know… some times you just need a worksheet.

These problems themselves involve tangents, central angles, and trig functions.  The actual learning unit is very similar, but requires the students to contextualize and decontextualize.  So without further comment – here’s some of the practice problems I used:

SatelliteGenQ1

SatelliteGenQ2

SatelliteGenQ3

The Goods: (sorry I only have pdf’s, I create things with Adobe Illustrator)

SatelliteGenQ1

SatelliteGenQ2

SatelliteGenQ3