The bases are triangles and the sides (or faces) are rectangles. Think about those cool rainbow prisms you've seen in science. Not all prisms have a rectangular or square base. Volume of a square prism, or cube = (area of base)(height) In the case of the mysterious leaning tower of origami, the height is the distance from the top piece of paper straight down to the surface it sits on. The volume of an oblique prism is also (area of base)(height), but the height has to be perpendicular to the base. While the shape of the prism has changed a bit, the volume of the prism has not. If we slide the top of the stack over, but the base stays where it is, we can make a leaning tower of Pisa, or an oblique prism. If the stack is 5 inches high, then it has a volume of 25 in 2 Г— 5 inches of paper, or 125 in 3. In other words, the area of the base is 25 in 2. If each piece of origami paper is 5 inches long and 5 inches wide, the area of the piece of paper on the base of the stack is 25 inches 2. A piece of origami paper (think thin, colorful, easy to fold) is a square, and a stack of origami paper is a cube if it's as high as the paper is wide (or long). The length, width, and height of a cube are all equal. Let's look at another type of prism: a cube. Volume of a rectangular prism = (area of base) (height) Notice that if we multiply the total area of the base (12 units 2) by the total height of the base (4 units) we also get the area: 48 cubic units, or 48 units 3. The length of one cube is 1 unit, so the total length of the prism is 4 units. Since there are 12 cubes in the base of the prism, the area of the prism base is 12 units 2. The base of each cube is 1 unit wide and 1 unit high so its area is 1 unit 2. We can also find the volume by measuring. The prism has a volume of 48 cubic units. So, if we multiply the number of cubes in the base (12) by the number of rows (4), we find that there are 48 cubes. There are four rows with 12 cubes in each row. If we consider the front of this rectangular prism to be the base, we can see that it is made up of 12 cubes. The volume is the number of unit blocks that fill the prism. It's how much water fits inside a bathtub, how much sand fills a bucket, or how much soda your friend can chug and hold in his stomach. The volume of a solid is the amount of space inside the object.

Volume of triangular prism easy