1: Do you know what you look like/of course you do, because you can look in a good, clear mirror that shows you as you are?

 

2: Modern mirror is any good piece of smooth, flat glass that has been coated on one side with a thin film of silver. When you hold the silvered side away from you, you can see through the glass not through the metal behind it. The silver bounces your image back at you through the glass.

 

3: Once people had no mirrors at all except the still, clear surface of a pool.

Then they learned to polish metal and use its shiny surface as a mirror. Bat a metal mirror gave blurred or crooked images.

 

4: The first good glass mirrors were made by the people of Venice in Italy about the year 1200. The Golden Age of Glass in Venice Lasted for three hundred years. Venetian mirrors were tiny, but they sold at very high prices. Rich men had pins made of them to wear in their hats. Their ladies wore the mirrors on ribbons dangling from their belts.

5: Other countries tried to learn the secret of making glass mirrors. Within a few years the French made finer and bigger mirrors than those of the Venetians. This was because a Frenchman has invented plate glass.it was called this since he made it in a sheet or flat plate.

 

6: At first people didn’t know want to do with these new mirror. Then King Louis the fourteenth of France showed the world that big mirrors could decorate a room, just as small mirrors could decorate a man’s hat. He used a long row of mirrors to cover one whole wall of a luge room in has palace. When other people saw this Hall of mirrors, as it saw celled, they wanted large mirrors for their own homes.

 

7: Today mirrors are so   cheap that almost every house has many of them. A man shaves in front of a mirror. A woman uses a mirror when she puts on her clothes. A mirror in a dark corner seems to bring light in to that part of the room. A large mirror makes a room seem much larger.

8: One kind of mirror is now used in the door of a house to let those inside see who is calling before they open the door. This is called a transparent mirror. The metal backing on it is very thin. If there is not much light inside the house anyone inside can see right through the backing as if the mirror were just a piece of glass. The caller sees only himself. This is because the stronger light on his side makes the metal backing reflect, or bounce back, his image.e

9: Not all mirrors have flat surfaces. A dentist uses a tiny mirror when he checks your teeth... it has a curved surface and makes the image larger. Mirrors with curved surfaces are used also in telescopes to help make images of- far away stars larger. The biggest mirror in the worlds is two hundred inches across and weighs twenty tons. It is part of the world’s biggest telescope in California.

10: Today we have all sorts of trick mirrors, too. Mirrors with pink or gold tints make people look handsome and healthy. Mirrors that make people look all out of shape are part of the fun at a fair or circus.