Reference no: EM13683702

A "whispering room" is one with an elliptically-arched ceiling. If someone stands at one focus of the ellipse and whispers something to his friend, the dispersed sound waves are reflected by the ceiling and concentrated at the other focus, allowing people across the room to clearly hear what he said. Suppose such a gallery has a ceiling reaching twenty feet above the five-foot-high vertical walls at its tallest point (so the cross-section is half an ellipse topping two vertical lines at either end), and suppose the foci of the ellipse are thirty feet apart. What is the height of the ceiling above each "whispering point"?