A snooker player wants to corner a ball starting from a point on one side and bouncing two times from the opposite sides. Given the dimensions of the table in the figure, what’s the length of the track the snooker ball travels?
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Solution
The track length is 10.
The key in this solution is the mirror trick. As shown in the figure, applying the mirror trick twice amounts to calculating the length of the hypotenuse of a right triangle with known dimensions.