Bearings

Today we looked at bearings. Bearings are used in navigation to tell us what direction we are travelling or what direction we need to travel. Because we are dealing with directions and navigation it is important that you are familiar with the compass directions and the layout.

There are two main types of bearings used in navigation. They are
                    1. True bearings: This is basically how many degrees from north we have rotated in a clockwise direction. They must always be written as 3 digit numbers, so if we only rotate say 56 degrees, we need to write our true bearing as 056T (the T stand for "true").
                    2. Compass bearings: These tell us how far we have rotated from north or south in either a westerly or easterly direction. For example, if we have a compass bearing of N27E we have rotated from north 27 degrees in an easterly direction. Again, if we have S37W, we have started at south and rotated 37 degrees towards west.

I have made a PowerPoint presentation about this topic. It has some explanations based on this topic, as well as a few worked examples. This presentation can be found by clicking here

The most important skill to take from this is being able to convert between the two types of bearings (i.e. from a true bearing to a compass bearing, or visa versa). I have given a short explanation of this in the presentation as well as an example. If you are still having troubles, I have included a link to a good YouTube video in the presentation. If you are struggling to view that, the link is:

http://www.youtube.com/watchv=xv8Cuh6Rk5Q

If you are still struggling, feel free to comment on this post. As far as work for this goes, I have uploaded a worksheet into the worksheets tab. Have a look at that and work through those questions. It is only short so it shouldn't take too long to finish off.

Next lesson we will be looking to use these new skills as well as our skills in trigonometry to work through some scenarios on navigating.