AREA OF A TRAPEZOID

Before looking at the trapezoidal rule, you need to make sure that you can find the area of a simple trapezoid. The area of a trapezoid is given by the formula: Where a and b are the length of the parallel sides and h is the perpendicular height of the trapezoid. See the diagram below.

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So, for the example trapezoid below the area is ( (3 + 7) / 2 ) x 4 cm2 = 20 cm2