You and your friend are baking some cookies for your classmates. the recipe you have calls for 1/2 cup of sugar. if you don’t have a 1/2 measuring cup, what is another measurement you can use to equal 1/2.

The half measuring cup, one fourth measuring cup and the full cup are available for measures.

Now we also know that one fourth + one fourth makes two fourths which is half.

This is one way to measure one half in the absence of half measure cups.

Hence the other measurement we can use is the one fourth measuring cup twice to get half.

area of part 1:

a1=base*height/2=(8+2)*(8-2-2-1)/2=10*3/2=15 ft^2

area of part 2:

a2=length*width=(8+2)*1=10 ft2

area of part 3:

a3=length*width=8*2=16 ft2

total shaded area : a1+a2+a3=41 ft2

total area of the reactangle : a=16*8=128 ft2

total area of the nonshaded region : 128-41=87 ft2