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Volume of a rectangular prism

If you want to know how much stuff you can cram into a box, finding its volume is key. To calculate the volume of a box, you need to know its height, width, and depth. You can find the volume by multiplying these three dimensions together. This formula works regardless of the units you are using (e.g. meters, feet), he method is the same - just make sure your units match up! Created by Sal Khan.

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Video transcript

What is the volume of this box? Drag on the box to rotate it. So this is pretty neat. We can actually sit and rotate this box. And here it looks like everything's being measured in meters. So we want to measure our volume in terms of cubic meters. That's going to be our unit cube here. So when we want to think about how many cubic meters could fit in this box, we've already seen examples. You really just have to multiply the three different dimensions of this box. So if you wanted the number of cubic meters that could fit in here, it's going to be six meters times 8 meters times 7 meters which is going to give you something in cubic meters. So let's think about what that is. 6 times 8 is 48. Let me see if I can do this in my head. 48 times 7, that's 40 times 7, which is going to be 280 plus 8 times 7, which is 56, 280 plus 56 is going to be 336. Let's check our answer. Let's do one more of these. So what's the volume of this box? We'll once again, we have its height at six feet. Now everything is being measured in feet. We have it's width being four feet. So we could multiple the height times the width of four feet. And then we can multiply that times its depth of two feet. So 6 times 4 is 24 times 2 is 48 feet. 48, and I should say cubic feet. We're saying how many cubic feet can fit in here? When we multiply the various dimensions measured in feet, we're counting almost how many of those cubic feet can fit into this box.