To find the surface area of a prism (or any other geometric solid) we open the solid like a carton box and flatten it out to find all included geometric forms. There are both rectangular and triangular prisms. The volume tells us something about the capacity of a figure.Ī prism is a solid figure that has two parallel congruent sides that are called bases that are connected by the lateral faces that are parallelograms. The volume is a measure of how much a figure can hold and is measured in cubic units. When we determine the surface areas of a geometric solid we take the sum of the area for each geometric form within the solid. The surface area is the area that describes the material that will be used to cover a geometric solid.
