What Are Ellipses?

An ellipse is another shape, that like a circle, doesn’t have any sides or vertices. But while a circle is completely round, an ellipse is kind of “squeezed.” It looks like someone has stepped on a circle to flatten it.

Some ellipses are large, and some are small. Some ellipses are also flatter than others, as if they’ve been stepped on with more force.

Now, we’ll talk a bit about what an ellipse looks like when you mirror it about different lines of symmetry.

We’ll begin with looking at what happens when you mirror an ellipse across a line of symmetry that is outside the ellipse. In the image below, you can see that the mirrored ellipse is the exact same as the original ellipse, and has the same distance from the line of symmetry as the original ellipse.