Richard is flying a kite. The kite string makes an angle of 57 degress with the ground. If Richard is standing 100 feet from the point on the ground direcly below the kite, find the length of the kite string..

Draw a right triangle, and label the bottom of it the ground. The hypotenuse of this triangle is the legnth of the kite, so the angle made the hypotenuse and the ground is 57. Richard is standing 100 ft from this location, at the vertex of the right angle of this triangle, or at the other "end" of the ground. Since we have an adjacent side to the 57 degree angle (100 ft side) and are looking for the hypotenuse, we use cosine, which is adjacent over hypotenuse. So: cos(57) = 100/x. Solving this equation by multiplying by x and then dividing by cos (57) gives us 183.6 ft. So, the length of the kite string is 183.6 ft.