CHAPTER 17 Pre-AP/Critical Thinking

REFLECTION AND MIRRORS

1. Which of these images could be inverted?
a. image of a customer in a store’s convex security mirror
b. image of an object placed between the focal point and the surface of a concave mirror
c. image of a tree in the lens of a person’s convex sunglasses
d. image of a strawberry in the concave bowl of a shiny spoon
2. A shiny silver bowl acts as a mirrored surface with a radius of curvature of 6 cm. A
strawberry isheld 4 cm above the bottom of the bowl and then dropped. Which change occurs as
the strawberry falls to a height of 2 cm?
a. The image goes from being smaller to being larger than the object.
b. The image goes from right side up to upside down.
c. The image goes from being larger to being smaller than the object.
d. The image goes from upside down to right side up.
3. A concave mirror has a focal length, f. A nickel placed before the mirror has a real image that
is three times larger than the actual nickel. Which of these represents the object distance of the
nickel?
4
a. 3 f
3
b. 2 f
3
c. 4 f
2
d. 3 f

4. A concave spherical mirror forms an image of the Sun at a distance of 8.0 cm from the
mirror. What is the radius of curvature of the mirror? (Use 1.50×1013 cm as the distance to the Sun.)
Pre-AP/Critical Thinking continued

5. Wide-angle, aspherical convex mirrors sometimes are used as side-mounted mirrors on

passenger automobiles. These mirrors actually consist of two different types of mirrors formed
together. The inner part is a spherical convex mirror with a fairly large radius of curvature. The outer
part is a special convex portion that has a variable radius of curvature. The radius of curvature at the
edge of the mirror may be a factor of ten less than that of the inner portion.
a. Consider a vehicle with such an aspherical mirror on its passenger side. The inner
spherical portion of this mirror has a radius of curvature of r = 2.50 m. When the driver views a
truck of height h = 2.90 m that is 125 m distant to the rear of the center portion of the mirror,
what is the magnification of this part of the mirror, and what image height is seen?

b. If the radius of curvature were reduced to 0.250 m at the edge of the mirror, what would
be the new image height of the truck from part a?

c. Consider the passenger-side mirror described above. What advantages does a driver
have when viewing both nearby (closer than 10.0 m) and more distant objects through such a
mirror compared to using either a plane mirror or a simple spherical mirror?

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