Conic section

A conic section is like a fancy way of saying shapes that are made by slicing a cone (like a triangle-shaped ice cream cone) with a plane.

When you slice a cone in different ways, you can make different shapes like circles, ovals, parabolas, and hyperbolas. These shapes are called conic sections.

If you slice the cone straight across the top, you get a circle! This is the roundest of all the conic sections.

If you slice the cone at an angle, you get an ellipse which looks like a stretched out circle.

If you slice the cone at an even steeper angle, you get a parabola, which is like a U-shape.

Finally, if you slice the cone at a really steep angle, you get a hyperbola, which looks a bit like two parabolas facing each other.

These different shapes are all examples of conic sections and we use them a lot in math, science, and engineering to solve problems and study the world around us!