Question

To the nearest whole number what is the surface area of the right triangular prism?

Answer 1

check the picture below.

as you can see, the triangular prism is really just 2 triangles and 3 rectangles stacked up to each other at the edges.

So we can simply get the area of each shape, sum them up, and that's the surface area of the prism. Notice, the triangles have a base of 15, and a height of 9.

`\bf \stackrel{\textit{2 triangles}}{2\left[ \cfrac{1}{2}(15)(9) \right]}~~+~~(9\cdot 16)~~+~~(15\cdot 16)~~+~~(16\cdot 17.4)\implies 797.4`