I.+Introduction+to+Surface+Area

Have you ever wrapped a birthday gift? If so, then you've covered the surface area of a polyhedron with wrapping paper.

Surface area is exactly what it sounds like — the area of all of the outside surfaces of a three-dimensional object. In this lesson, you will learn about the concept of surface area as well as how to compute the surface area of various polyhedra.   The surface area of a polyhedron is equal to the sum of the area of all of its faces. Said another way, the surface area is the total area covered by the net of a polyhedron. Let's take a look at a cube.  As you already know, a cube has six square faces. If each of those faces is 3 inches by 3 inches, then the area of each face is 3 × 3 = 9 square inches. And since there are six of them, the total surface area is 9 + 9 + 9 + 9 + 9 + 9 = 54 square inches.  To find the surface area of any shape, you can follow the process described below:  But for many polyhedra, there are formulas that can be used to find the total surface area. For instance, the formula for the surface area of a cube is:  SAcube = 6s2  where **s ** is the side length of the square faces.
 * 1)  Draw a net of the polyhedron.
 * 2)  Calculate the area of each face.
 * 3)  Add up the area of all the faces.