Surface area is the total area of all of the faces of the prism. If you took apart a cardboard box and laid it flat, you’d be looking at its surface area. Surface area measures the two dimensional space that all the sides take up, so we use two dimensional units to measure it like square feet or square meters.
You are wrapping a gift in a rectangular box, and you need to know how much wrapping paper to use. You need to know the
A
volume of the box.
B
area of the box.
C
perimeter of the top of the box.
D
surface area of the box.
D. surface area of the box.
A rectangular prism has six faces, and each face is identical to the one opposite. The top and bottom are the same, the front and back are the same, and the left and right sides are the same. One kind of a rectangular prism is a cube, which has sides of all the same length.
Which of the following describes a rectangular prism?
A
a shape with six faces where each face is different
B
a two-dimensional shape with four angles
C
a three-dimensional shape where one face is a circle.
D
a shape with six faces where all six faces are identical