Math Angle question

Pls read the sticky at the top of the forum about answering questions, in particular
"If a hint has already been given, please do not offer a bigger hint."

I believe a better (not bigger hint) should be provided if my judgement is that the first hint is not the best approach for the student to take. I thought in this case mentioning that the question is based on the unit circle is critical to a student’s understanding of the question. Your suggestion to the OP that they use Pythagoras to work out the hypotenuse completely misses the point of the question. It should be obvious that the radius of the unit circle is 1 unit. My question about how cosβ (Q1) relates to cosβ (Q3) encourages the OP to think about how they can find an answer to cosθ (taking into account it’s sign). No calculation is required - just observation of the circle diagram.

I believe a better (not bigger hint) should be provided if my judgement is that the first hint is not the best approach for the student to take. I thought in this case mentioning that the question is based on the unit circle is critical to a student’s understanding of the question. Your suggestion to the OP that they use Pythagoras to work out the hypotenuse completely misses the point of the question. It should be obvious that the radius of the unit circle is 1 unit. My question about how cosβ (Q1) relates to cosβ (Q3) encourages the OP to think about how they can find an answer to cosθ (taking into account it’s sign). No calculation is required - just observation of the circle diagram.

It should be obvious that the radius of the unit circle is 1 unit.

I'm with @mqb2766 here. As well as disregarding "If a hint has already been given, please do not offer a bigger hint" you have also disregarded "Do not "barge in" while another helper is offering hints".

How is it "obvious" that it's a unit circle?

Unless it's explicitly stated, it's dangerous to assume it, rather than make the (easy) calculation.

I don’t believe advising the OP to calculate the hypotenuse using Pythagoras is the correct approach in this instance and so I provided an alternative approach to help the student gain a complete understanding of the question. I believe it is important for a student to be offered alternative approaches to answering questions and so offering a hint along a different line is not barging in when the first hint relates to a different method to answering the question. The first approach makes no mention of the unit circle which the question is based on. I certainly agree that a bigger hint should not be given if a hint has already been provided by someone, provided both hints are using the same approach. If as this case a different approach is taken then a first hint for the alternative method, I believe, is valid and necesssary for the benefit of the student.