We know that the box is a cube, so we know that this box has 6 sides of equal area.
So if one of the sides is 8.5 inches, then since it's a square, we know all of the sides are also 8.5 inches.
So the area of one side of the box is

Then we need to multiply this by 6 to get the total surface area of the box:

So now we know that the total surface area of the box is C) 433.5 square inches.