A few days ago

What do the apostrophes in degree problems stand for and how do you calculate them?

My trigonometery teacher convienently left out this part of her lessons and my first assignment for PreCalculus has a question asking you to find the complement of angle with one of these in it. I was told that they’re called minutes but nothing I’ve searched for online has yielded anything.

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A few days ago
hayharbr

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A single apostrophe stands for minutes; there are 60 minutes in a degree. A double apostrophe (quotation mark) is seconds; 60 seconds in a minute. So for example, the complement of an angle measuring 42 degrees 36′ 20″ would be

47 degrees 23′ 40″

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