If you have a right triangle and both the opposite and adjacent sides have values of ex.10 or the same value. How do you determine which side is the opposite and which is the adjacent if they are both the same length?
For example, are the opposite and adjacent parts of the triangle changed if your flip the triangle another direction? I guess what I'm asking is are the opposite and adjacent parts of the triangle the same no matter what direction it's pointing?
I'm having trouble understating how to identify the different parts of a right triangle.
Best Answer
The terms "opposite" and "adjacent" are relative terms, which depend on a chosen one of the two non-right angles in a right triangle. So if the triangle is $ABC$ with the right angle at vertex $C$, then if you are considering nonright angle/vertex $A$, its opposite is the side not containing that vertex, so is side $BC$, while its adjacent is the other nonhypotenuse side $AC$ which does contain the considered vertex $A$.
Basically however the triangle is oriented, one imagines "standing" inside one of the angles, and looking "across" to the "opposite" (nonhypotenuse) for that angle, and the "adjacent" for that angle is the (nonhypotenuse) side one could touch from the place one is standing.
Note that neither opposite nor adjacent is ever the hypotenuse. And as Gerry Myerson just noted in a comment, the two could have the same length or not, and the terms still distinguish which is called which, based on the chosen non-right angle.