Translations and Reflections: Introduction

Trees and mountains reflecting on a lake

Have you ever seen a beautiful reflection of mountains and trees on a lake that is so still it looks like glass?  A picture like the one you see above shows how the trees and mountains are reflected on the lake.  You can hardly tell which the real image is and which the reflection is.  This is because the reflection is the exact same size and shape as the real image.  In this section, we are going to begin studying various types of transformations, specifically translations and reflections.