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What are Bearings
On your GCSE / IGCSE maths exam your knowledge on trigonometry might be tested by a question involving bearings. Bearings are used to describe a particular direction in which an object is traveling, or a particular direction in which an object is seen. It is used by pilots for instance but when I was studying at the Royal Dutch Naval college in the Netherlands, we also used bearing to navigate our ships. We would tell our steersman for instance to change direction at a bearing of 063 degrees. Everybody then knew exactly which direction the ship would be going to (at an angle of 63 degrees starting counting from the north in a clockwise direction). Traveling due east would therefore be traveling at a bearing of 090 degrees and due south at a bearing of 180 degrees (what is the bearing when you are traveling due west?).
The following two videos discuss the same question (the hard-disk of my camera was full and therefore it stopped working half way through the question). You will notice when studying this question, that you will have to apply previously gained knowledge and skills like the sine and cosine rule. Leave me a message if you continue having problems with bearings and I will make another video for you. Good luck and have fun!!
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