Surface area and volume.What's the difference?

Answer 1

Surface area is in square units, like square inches, square feet, square miles, etc. You'd measure the area of a town in square miles. You'd meausure the area of a house in square feet.
Volume is in cubic units, like cubic inches, cubic centimeters, cubic yards, etc.
You'd measure the volume of a bottle in cubic centimeters or cubic inches. You'd measure the volume of a town dump in cubic yards. You'd measure the volume of a house in cubic feet or cubic meters.
See also
http://www.shodor.org/interactivate/activities/SurfaceAreaAndVolume/?version=1.5.0_06&browser=MSIE&vendor=Sun_Microsystems_Inc.
Like I said a little while ago...
Volume is the space inside of a three dimensional object.
Area is the space along the two dimensional surface of a figure or an object.
Like with a box, area is the amount of paper you'd need to wrap it. Volume is the amount of plastic peanuts you'd need to fill it.

Answer 2

Let's take for example a fish tank. Mathematically you will get the volume by multiplying the length by the width and the height. The result will represent the volume and will help you determine how much water you can fit on the tank.

To get the surface area you will need to sum the individual surface area of each individual glass. You can do this by multiplying the height by the width of each glass.

Answer 3

Surface area is 2 dimensional and volume is 3 dimensional.

Surface area units: ft squared, meters squared, or whatever squared. It tells you if how much area something covers. It does not have to be a closed system like a box, or sphere. It is more like a "sheet" of something.

Volume units: ft cubed, meters cubed (or milliliters, gallons, quarts whatever) It is how much space something requires. You can get volume by taking surface area and multiplying that value by it's height (assuming a circle or square, other shapes require special formulas).

Answer 4

Area is a physical quantity expressing the size of a part of a surface. The term can also be used in a non-mathematical context to be mean "vicinity".

Surface area is the summation of the areas of the exposed sides of an object
Units for measuring surface area include:

square metre = SI derived unit
are = 100 square metres
hectare = 10,000 square metres
square kilometre = 1,000,000 square metres
square megametre = 1012 square metres
Imperial units, as currently defined from the metre:

square foot (plural square feet) = 0.09290304 square metres
square yard = 9 square feet = 0.83612736 square metres
square perch = 30.25 square yards = 25.2928526 square metres
acre = 160 square perches or 43,560 square feet = 4046.8564224 square metres
square mile = 640 acres = 2.5899881103 square kilometres
Old European area units, still in used in some private matters (e.g. land sale advertisements)

square fathom (fahomia in some sources[citation needed]) = 3.34450944 square metres
cadastral moon(acre) = 1600? square fathoms = 5755 square metres.

Volume is defined as the amount of space taken up by a three-dimensional object.
Volume often refers to liquid volume, which is defined as the amount of space taken up by a liquid, which spreads completely to fill its container.

There several devices used for measuring volume:

measuring spoons - tablespoon, teaspoon, 1/2 teaspoon, 1/4 teaspoon
measuring cups
graduated cylinders
beakers

[text:cube] = a^{3}

[text:rectangular prism] = a b c

[text:irregular prism] = b h

[text:cylinder] = b h = [pi] r^{2} h

[text:pyramid] = (1/3) b h

[text:cone] = (1/3) b h = 1/3 [pi] r^{2} h

[text:sphere] = (4/3) [pi] r^{3}

[text:ellipsoid] = (4/3) pi r1 r2 r3

Answer 5

Think of a cube. It has six sides. The width times length of each side added together is the surface area.

Now think about the inside of a cube. The width times length times depth is the volume. It's the entire cube itself.

Answer 6

Consider a pitcher of water. The volume defines how many glasses you can fill from the pitcher. The surface area of the water consists of its free top surface, the circular bottom, and the cylindrical sides.

Answer 7

surface area is the area on the outside surface of the object and volume is the area inside the object depending on the shape of your object circle, square, triangle, ect each will have a different formula to calculate.

Answer 8

Surface is the face of the plain object in two dimensions, using the square meter (m²) while volume is all the space of the solid object in three dimensions, using the cubical meter (m³).
>:<

Answer 9

Surface area is measured in square units such as square meters, square feet, square inches, etc. There is no thickness involved.

Volume is measured in cubic units such as cubic feet, cubic inches, cubic centimeters, etc. Volume has three dimensions, length width and height as opposed to area which only has length times width.

Answer 10

area is a 2 dimensional measure, how large is an 2 dimensional surface

Volume is measuring the content of a 3-dimensional body


Geometry > Solid Geometry > Volume



From MathWorld Classroom

The volume of a solid body is the amount of "space" it occupies.