The first helpful thing to notice, is that the range of the cosine inverse function is between
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and
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. This means we can't do the old method of cancelling out the inverse cosine and the cosine because this would give us
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which since
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is acute would not be valid since it is outside the range.
However, we can still try to apply this by manipulating the expression. First, to give a proper definition of the trick, remember that:
This is true precisely because of the definition of an inverse function, and precisely because that domain
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is the domain of the original
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function that we wish to 'invert'.
So proceeding from this, we want to manipulate the given expression into one in which we can use
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.
Remember that,
 = -\cos \alpha )
and
 = - \cos \alpha )
, which means
 = \cos(\pi + \alpha) )
(To see this fact more clearly, imagine drawing horizontal lines in a y = cos x graph below the x-axis, and see that when the line intersects one part of the cosine graph, it intersects the opposite side,
symmetrical to
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)
So that,