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The awe‐inspiring Great Pyramid of Cheops was built more than 4500 years ago. Its square base, originally 230 m on a side, covered 13.1 acres, and it was 146 m high (H), with a mass of about 7×10^9 kg. (The pyramid’s dimensions are slightly different today due to quarrying and some sagging). Historians estimate that 20,000 workers spent 20 years to construct it, working 12-hour days, 330 days per year.

a) Calculate the gravitational potential energy stored in the pyramid, given its center of mass is at one-fourth its height.

b) Only a fraction of the workers lifted blocks; most were involved in support services such as building ramps, bringing food and water, and hauling blocks to the site. Calculate the efficiency of the workers who did the lifting, assuming there were 1000 of them and they consumed food energy at the rate of 300 Kcal/hour.

first we calculate the number of hours worked per year.

then we calculate the number of hours worked in the 20 years.

Then we calculate the energy consumed in 20 years knowing the energy consumed per hour and the total hours worked in 20 years.

The efficiency is the resulting potential energy divided by the consumed energy.

In a video game design, a map shows the location of other characters relative to the player, who is situated at the origin, and the direction they are facing. A character currently shows on the map at coordinates (-3, 5). If the player rotates counterclockwise by 20 degrees, then the objects in the map will correspondingly rotate 20 degrees clockwise. Find the new coordinates of the character.

To rotate the position of the character, we can imagine it as a point on a circle, and we will change the angle of the point by 20 degrees. To do so, we first need to find the radius of this circle and the original angle.

Drawing a right triangle inside the circle, we can find the radius using the Pythagorean Theorem:

To find the angle, we need to decide first if we are going to find the acute angle of the triangle, the reference angle, or if we are going to find the angle measured in standard position. While either approach will work, in this case we will do the latter. By applying the cosine function and using our given information we get

While there are two angles that have this cosine value, the angle of 120.964 degrees is in the second quadrant as desired, so it is the angle we were looking for.

Rotating the point clockwise by 20 degrees, the angle of the point will decrease to 100.964 degrees. We can then evaluate the coordinates of the rotated point

For x axis:

For y axis:

The coordinates of the character on the rotated map will be (-1.109, 5.725)

Reference : PreCalculus: An Investigation of Functions,Edition 1.4 © 2014 David Lippman and Melonie Rasmussen
http://www.opentextbookstore.com/precalc/
Creative Commons License : http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/us/