Introduction

Imagine you're planning to paint a large garden, and you need to know how much paint you'll need to cover the ground. You’ve got a variety of shapes to work with: some areas are rectangular, others are circular, and a few are more complex, like trapeziums or irregular quadrilaterals. To make sure you buy the right amount of paint, you need to calculate the area of each of these shapes.

In real life, the concept of area is used to solve many practical problems like this one. Whether it’s determining the size of a piece of land, the surface of a pool, or even the amount of fabric needed to make a tent, understanding how to calculate the area of different planar (flat) figures is essential.

This chapter will guide you through the process of finding the area of common planar figures—shapes that exist in two dimensions—starting with simpler shapes and progressing to more complex ones.