Past exam of the options II course of the University of Oxford / 2008 printed variant / E / E3 / a / Solution

For a fixed centre $a$, the triangle inequality gives $|d(a,x)-d(a,y)|\le d(x,y)$, so the distance-to-centre function is continuous. Its preimage of $(-\infty ,r]$ is the closed ball, hence is closed. Since that closed set contains the corresponding open ball, it contains its closure:Here the bar on the right denotes a closed ball, while the bar on the left denotes closure.