How do I express a height of a cone in terms of r?
Thanks
Phy124 may have answered your question, but I'm not sure without context. The other option might be the usual question that comes up in an exam with a cone leaking water or whatever, so I'll run through that too.
You'll have the dimensions of the full cone I presume, say of radius 10cm and height 40cm. If we draw a line from the point of the cone to the centre of the circular end, and connect this with the sloped side, a triangle is formed. The hypotenuse of this triangle is the slope, the longer side is the height of the cone (40cm) and the shorter side is the radius of the cone (10cm).
If we look at this triangle, we could also draw a similar (pun intended) triangle from the same point of the cone, to wherever the water level may lie. We have the same angle formed at the bottom, and we have a right angle in both, so (as my humour foreshadowed) we literally have similar triangles.
In our smaller triangle, the longer side represents the height of the water, or depth, which we'll call h. The shorter side represents the radius of the water at the surface level, which we'll call r. Now, with similar triangles, the ratios between the side lengths must be equal. So we can say...

and thus
