The sinusoidal equation of cosine can be modeled by someone riding a Ferris wheel: as one rides the

Ferris wheel, your distance from the ground varies sinusoidally with time. When the last seat is filled and
the Ferris wheel starts, your seat is at the position shown in FIGURE 5. Let t be the number of seconds
that have elapsed since the Ferris wheel started. You find that it takes you three seconds to reach the
top, forty-three feet above the ground, and that the wheel makes a revolution once every eight seconds.
The diameter of the wheel is forty feet. This model perfectly represents the sinusoidal equation of
cosine with the equation: f(t) = 23 + 20 cos

(t 3) => y = C + A cosB (x D). This is because it tells us the

diameter is forty which makes the radius twenty which is the amplitude, A, of cosine. Also, since we
know the highest point of the Ferris wheel is forty-three, we subtract the radius, twenty, because the
radius represents the x-axis of cosine graph. That calculation gives us twenty-three which is how much
the cosine graph moves up or down along the y-axis, C. Since we know that a single revolution of the
Ferris wheel takes eight seconds, we can use the formula

to give us the angle which is

represented by the letter B. Lastly, since we know that it takes three seconds for you to reach the top of
the Ferris wheel and on the original cosine graph we start at the highest point at t = 0, that means we
must shift our graph over three places to the right so D = 3.