Surface Areas And Volumes

12.1 Introduction

From Class IX, you are familiar with some of the solids like cuboid, cone, cylinder, and sphere (see Fig. 12.1). You have also learnt how to find their surface areas and volumes.

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Fig. 12.1

In our day-to-day life, we come across a number of solids made up of combinations of two or more of the basic solids as shown above.

You must have seen a truck with a container fitted on its back (see Fig. 12.2), carrying oil or water from one place to another. Is it in the shape of any of the four basic solids mentioned above? You may guess that it is made of a cylinder with two hemispheres as its ends.

Fig. 12.2

Again, you may have seen an object like the one in Fig. 12.3. Can you name it? A test tube, right! You would have used one in your science laboratory. This tube is also a combination of a cylinder and a hemisphere. Similarly, while travelling, you may have seen some big and beautiful buildings or monuments made up of a combination of solids mentioned above.

If for some reason you wanted to find the surface areas, or volumes, or capacities of such objects, how would you do it? We cannot classify these under any of the solids you have already studied.

Fig. 12.3

In this chapter, you will see how to find surface areas and volumes of such objects.

12.2 Surface Area of a Combination of Solids

Let us consider the container seen in Fig. 12.2. How do we find the surface area of such a solid? Now, whenever we come across a new problem, we first try to see, if we can break it down into smaller problems, we have earlier solved. We can see that this solid is made up of a cylinder with two hemispheres stuck at either end. It would look like what we have in Fig. 12.4, after we put the pieces all together.

Fig. 12.4

If we consider the surface of the newly formed object, we would be able to see only the curved surfaces of the two hemispheres and the curved surface of the cylinder.

So, the total surface area of the new solid is the sum of the curved surface areas of each of the individual parts. This gives,

TSA of new solid $=$ CSA of one hemisphere + CSA of cylinder + CSA of other hemisphere

where TSA, CSA stand for ‘Total Surface Area’ and ‘Curved Surface Area’ respectively.

Let us now consider another situation. Suppose we are making a toy by putting together a hemisphere and a cone. Let us see the steps that we would be going through.

First, we would take a cone and a hemisphere and bring their flat faces together. Here, of course, we would take the base radius of the cone equal to the radius of the hemisphere, for the toy is to have a smooth surface. So, the steps would be as shown in Fig. 12.5.

Fig. 12.5

At the end of our trial, we have got ourselves a nice round-bottomed toy. Now if we want to find how much paint we would require to colour the surface of this toy, what would we need to know? We would need to know the surface area of the toy, which consists of the CSA of the hemisphere and the CSA of the cone.

So, we can say:

Total surface area of the toy $=$ CSA of hemisphere + CSA of cone

12.3 Volume of a Combination of Solids

In the previous section, we have discussed how to find the surface area of solids made up of a combination of two basic solids. Here, we shall see how to calculate their volumes. It may be noted that in calculating the surface area, we have not added the surface areas of the two constituents, because some part of the surface area disappeared in the process of joining them. However, this will not be the case when we calculate the volume. The volume of the solid formed by joining two basic solids will actually be the sum of the volumes of the constituents, as we see in the examples below.

12.4 Summary

In this chapter, you have studied the following points:

1. To determine the surface area of an object formed by combining any two of the basic solids, namely, cuboid, cone, cylinder, sphere and hemisphere.

2. To find the volume of objects formed by combining any two of a cuboid, cone, cylinder, sphere and hemisphere.



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