How to Calculate Volume of a Rectangular Prism

Video Transcript

"Hi, I'm Steve Jones, I'm going to show you how to calculate the volume of a rectangular prism. Here's our rectangular prism. As you know a prism has the same cross section when cut it any place in any direction. So this is a rectangular prism; the height is h, the perpendicular height; the width is w and the length is l. Remember, all of these are right angles on this corner, these are all right angles and the whole thing is completely square. Now, the volume is very simple to calculate. What we need to do is calculate the base of the prism, the width times the height and then multiply it by the length. So the base area, multiplied by the length. Here's the base area, the width times the height and we multiply it by the length. Now we got some values here, let's put them and then see how it works. So the volume is equal to the length, the length here is 6 cm., multiplied by the width, the width here, we said its 4 cm., multiplied by the height which we said here is 3 cm. These are numbers chosen to give us simple result. Okay. So your 6 times 4, 4 6's are 24 and 3 times 24 is 72. So that's 72 cm. Now remember 70 meters, cube, it's going to be, it's a volume. The reason is, it's cube because we have three dimensions. In one dimension it's the length, that's in cm.; two dimensions cm. squared, it's an area; three dimensions, cm. cube. So that's simply how to calculate the volume of a rectangular prism."