Junior Cert Trigonometry – What Do I Need to Know?

So I stripped down this question to help make the point that there are very few skills required to answer Trigonometry questions at Junior Cert Higher Level.

This question from the 2022 paper had a paragraph of information describing in words what is obvious from the image.

Your job is to simply find C, y and z over the course of the 3 parts of the question.

The Junior Cert specification asks students to know how to use:

1. Pythagoras Theorem.
🌞 Find the missing side of a right-angled triangle, given the lengths of the two other sides.
🌞 Prove a triangle is right-angled, given the length of all three sides.

2. The Trigonometric Ratios.
🌞 Find the measure of an angle of a right-angled triangle given the lengths of two of the sides.
🌞 Find the length of a missing side of a right-angled triangle given the measure of one angle (other than the right angle) and the length of one of the other sides.

That’s kind of it…there will be questions that require students to also have a basic knowledge Geometry, Coordinate Geometry, Area and Volume, Algebra etc…and most questions on the Junior Cert paper have this cross topic dimension…but in terms of pure Trig skills…understand Pythagoras and the Ratios well.

If you are looking for practice packs of questions and worked solutions head to the website.

You can find the following under the JCHL Resources by Topic

👉 Trigonometry Revision Sheet
👉 Trigonometry JCHL
👉 Trigonometry with Geometry JCHL
👉 Area, Perimeter and Volume with Trigonometry
👉 Trigonometry EXTRA JCHL

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