Video Transcript
What is the area of this shape?
This composite shape is made up of what looks like two rectangles. We could break it up into these two pieces: rectangle one and rectangle two. To find our total area, we’ll need to first find the area of rectangle one and add that to the area of rectangle two. To find the area of a rectangle, we use the formula length times width.
Our small rectangle has a length of five centimetres; it has a width of three centimetres. So we’ll plug all of that into our formula, and we have three times five. And now we’ll move on to the bigger rectangle, rectangle two. What is rectangle two’s length? Rectangle two has a length of nine centimetres; rectangle two has a width of 6.5 centimetres.
Now that everything is plugged into our equation, let’s solve. Five times three equals 15; nine times 6.5 equals 58.5. By adding those two together, added together that produces total area of 73.5. When we’re dealing with area, we can’t forget to think about the units. In this problem, all of our units are expressed in centimetres. And we’re dealing with area, which means we’re dealing with our centimetres squared. The total area of this figure equals 73.5 centimetres squared.
