Now a ball is launched from a vertex of an equilateral triangle with side length 5. It strikes the opposite side after traveling a distance of . How many times does the ball bounce before it returns to a vertex? (The final contact with a vertex does not count as a bounce.)
Solution
The key idea is that, instead of reflecting the line off of , we will reflect about and extend beyond . We keep doing this until the extension of hits a vertex of one of our reflected triangles. This is illustrated in the diagram below: We can calculate that the line has slope , so that (as indicated in the diagram), first intersects a vertex at the point . To get there, it has to travel through 2 horizontal lines, 1 upward sloping line, and 4 downward sloping lines, so it bounces times total.
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