Exploring Reflections 1

Author:
Mr. Watson
You made it to reflections? Not bad. Have you ever looked in a mirror and noticed a blemish on one side of your face, but that tricky mirror flips that blemish to the other side of your face? Try cutting your hair using a mirror sometime, that's really confusing. This is what happened when Blossom tried to do it: Better learn your reflections well, or you could look like Blossom on a truly bad hair day. Now take a look at the diagram below. You have a few more tools this time, but don't play around with those until the instructions tell you to. The dotted line is of the form y=mx+b (slope intercept form), and the slope and y-intercept may be changed by using the sliders in the top right. Try playing around with the slope and y-intercept and notice what happens to the image (pink). If the image moves off your screen, use the move toolToolbar Image or the zoom toolsToolbar Image Toolbar Image to get a better view. You may need to long click on the move tool to find the zoom tools.

Question 1

Hit the reset button in the top right corner (it looks like this ). Move the y-intercept so that the reflection image (that's the pink one that changes when you move the sliders) is "back to back" with the pre-image (the brown one). More specifically, place B' and B at the same point, and C' and C at the same point, but A' and A will be at different points.What is the formula for this line? If you don't remember how to find the equation for a line given a graph, use this link to discover the secrets of line equation magic! (I would suggest the mathisfun website for this one)

Move on the Exploring Reflections 2.