11-2 Surface Areas of Prisms and Cylinders

Objective

To find the surface area of a prism and a cylinder

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In the Solve It, you investigated the structure of a tube. In this lesson, you will learn properties of three-dimensional figures by investigating their surfaces.

Essential Understanding To find the surface area of a three-dimensional figure, find the sum of the areas of all the surfaces of the figure.

A prism is a polyhedron with two congruent, parallel faces, called bases. The other faces are lateral faces. You can name a prism using the shape of its bases.

An altitude of a prism is a perpendicular segment that joins the planes of the bases. The height h of a prism is the length of an altitude. A prism may either be right or oblique.

In a right prism, the lateral faces are rectangles and a lateral edge is an altitude. In an oblique prism, some or all of the lateral faces are nonrectangular. In this book, you may assume that a prism is a right prism unless stated or pictured otherwise.

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