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What is the Formula for the Area of a Trapezoid?

What is the formula for the area of a trapezoid?

Summary

  1. Make a flipped version of our trapezoid
  2. Combining the two trapezoids will create a parallelogram
  3. We can find the area of a trapezoid from the area of a parallelogram
  4. The 'base' of our parallelogram was just the sum of the two bases of our trapezoid
  5. So, we know that the area of a trapezoid is just half that of a parallelogram!

Notes

    1. By forming a parallelogram from the trapezoid we have, we can find the general formula for the area of any trapezoid!
    1. Since a parallelogram is made from two trapezoids...
    2. We can just divide the area of a parallelogram by 2 to get the formula for the area of a trapezoid