Surface area of prisms
Surface area of prisms
Rectangular prisms
A prism has a uniform cross-section. When you take slices through a rectangular prism parallel to the base you get rectangles identical to the base. So the area of each slice is always the same.
In order to find the total surface area (TSA) of a prism, we can unfold the net of the solid to reveal the individual faces, as shown in the diagram below.
© Australian Mathematical Sciences Institute, except where indicated otherwise. This material is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 3.0 Unported (CC BY-NC 3.0) licence http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/3.0/