hello and welcome to 5-minute math today we're looking at the sixth grade concept of area specifically how we can find the area of a parallelogram by using the shape of the parallelogram and also using the formula we'll do it in five minutes or less so you see here we have our standard pedelec parallelogram it is a quadrilateral that means it's got four sides and it has two pairs of parallel sides so you see that we have parallel two sets of parallel sides we've got the top the bottom and then our two slanted sights here are parallel to each other now this may look like it's overly complicated but it's actually a very simple formula and you're gonna recognize it area equals length times width which is the exact same formula that we use for a rectangle now in case you think that we somehow messed up here let's just take a look at what this parallelogram is this parallelogram is a four-sided shape just like a rectangle and it has two sets of parallel sides just like a rectangle because a rectangle has two sets of parallel sides the only difference here is that the rectangle has four square quarters whereas this is slanted but if we were to take some scissors here and chop off this part of the parallelogram to give it some square corners right here and if we were to rotate this over here this little chunk guess what it would fit right there and it would create a rectangle if you don't believe me cut it out with a piece of paper a parallelogram chopped off one side and see what happens when you take this side and you move it over here it fits to make a perfect rectangle so that's what we can say the area of a parallelogram is going to be length times width just like the area of a rectangle now let's see what that looks like in action so if you are wanting to find the area of a parallelogram you need two units the length which in this case would be six inches multiplied by the height but in this case the height is not two inches the two inches is the length of this slanted side and I would need the two inches in the six inches if I wanted to find the perimeter but that is not the height the height is always straight up and down so what you will see is that it is going to be a dotted line it's going to be an imaginary line so in this case we're going to say it's 1.5 inches so it's not one of the sides but it's always going to be given to you if you need to find the area it can be given inside or it can also be given outside like this and it would be shown with the same height of 1.5 inches the only trick here is to remember that the slanted side if given that is not the height you need straight up and down which is perpendicular to the bottom side so we can take our six and a 1.5 and then that's going to be just a basic multiplication six times 1.5 the area is going to equals nine make sure we have inches squared now it's time for you to try we have two different parallelograms here take a moment to pause the video find the area of both and when you have your answer go and unpause it and check your work all right let's look at this first one over here on the left the only trick here is that it is tilted it's rotated about 90 degrees so it's up and down rather than side-to-side but besides that it's not anything difficult here remember we have area equals length times width so in this case we're going to take our length of five inches we're going to multiply that by our height or width and that's going to be one point five inches so five times one point five that is going to be it gets C seven point five and please remember it is inch squared since we are looking at our unit of inches squared rather than just kind of area now we have over here with that three different units remember we do not need the length of a slanted side we simply need the length of the top the straight side the length and also the width or in this case it's going to be height you can say length times height you could say base times height and in this case we're looking at 10 times 2 that's going to be 20 centimeters squared