Adjacent facts for kids
Adjacent is a word that means "next to" or "bordering on." You might hear it used in everyday life to describe things that are right beside each other. For example, if your house is adjacent to a park, it means your house is right next to the park.
What Does "Adjacent" Mean?
The word "adjacent" comes from Latin and simply means "lying near." It helps us describe the position of one thing in relation to another. When two things are adjacent, they are touching or very close.
Adjacent in Geometry
In the world of geometry, "adjacent" is used to describe parts of shapes. When we talk about a shape like a square or a triangle, two sides are called adjacent if they meet at a vertex (a corner point). These two sides work together to create an angle.
- Imagine a square. Any two sides that meet at a corner are adjacent sides.
- The angle formed at that corner is made by those two adjacent sides.
Adjacent in Trigonometry
Trigonometry is a branch of math that studies triangles, especially right triangles. In a right triangle, one angle is always 90 degrees. When we are looking at one of the other angles (not the 90-degree one), the "adjacent side" is the side that is right next to that angle.
- This side is not the longest side (which is called the hypotenuse).
- It's the side that helps form the angle you are focusing on, along with the hypotenuse.
- The other side, which is across from the angle, is called the "opposite side."
Understanding the adjacent side is very important in trigonometry. It helps us use special functions like cosine to figure out unknown lengths or angles in triangles.
