How to Find the Area of a Trapezoid (It's way easier than it sounds)

I haven't been on for a few days, but I just got really swamped with school and stuff around the house- but the main thing here is I'M BACK!!!!!! Hahahaha. Now, in this post, I'm going to teach you how to find the area of  a trapezoid if you know the base measures and the height. Give me a second to go onto Google and get a picture for you to look at and I'll be right back....


  There we are, now, the formula for area of a trapezoid is

1/2h (a+b) Now that's read as 'half the height times the sum of the bases.' Now, there are some things you need to know about trapezoids before you start to find their area:

1) Trapezoids have 2 bases
2) These 2 bases are parallel (they could go on and on forever in the same direction and not ever cross paths)
3) It doesn't matter which bases you label 'a' and which one you label 'b,' just make sure to add the lengths of the bases together.

Now, on the picture above (I'm really psyched that I even got a picture on here, so please feel free to draw it on a separate piece of paper :)  ), the bases are labeled 10 meters and 8 meters (the little 'm' next to the numbers is short for meters), and the height of the trapezoid is labeled 9 meters. All you have to do now is plug in your values:

(1/2)x(9)x(10+18)  This should read 'half of 9 times the sum of 10 and 18.' This may look like a lot of scary numbers and parenthesis, but just take it a little bit at a time and don't panic: you're going to start with the (1/2) times (9) bit. Saying 'one half times nine' is the same as just taking half of 9 (it may sound redundant, but it just seems easier to understand that way). If you want to use a calculator, just put in .5 times 9 and you should get 4.5 or 4 and one half. Now you should have 4.5 times the sum of 10 and 18. So, now, add 10 and 18 (you should get 28) and multiply that by 4.5. this would be a pretty good time to use a calculator if you don't want to do the multiplication on paper (or in your head), not that it wouldn't be good practice. Anyway, you should get 126 for the area of the trapezoid. Like I said in the last post I did concerning area, you always tack on 'square units' to the end of your answer; in this case, your final answer would be 126 square meters.

Remember, if you need some more help on finding the area of trapezoids, just go to www.khanacademy.org , type in the topic and a bunch of videos will pop up that will help you further understand it. Thanks for reading! :)

-Meredith