A heavy box is pulled across a wooden floor with a rope. the rope makes 60 degrees with the floor.?

Question

A heavy box is pulled across a wooden floor with a rope. the rope makes 60 degrees with the floor. A force of 75N is exerted on the rope. What is the component of the force parallel to the floor?

Answer 1

The rope is the hypotenuse of the triangle you need to analyse so it's going to be sin60 or cos60 times 75N. An easy way to decide which: as a test, consider if the angle were 90. The horizontal component would be 0. Is sin90 or cos90 = 0? Cos, right? So the component of the force parallel to the floor is cos60 times 75N.