In this lesson, students practice working with areas of scaled figures, connecting them to cross-sections. If students continue to think dilating by a scale factor of multiplies areas by , rather than , there is an optional activity addressing this common misconception.

Students create a graph representing and use it to answer questions about a situation. They analyze the shape of the graph to better understand the relationship between an area and the scale factor needed to achieve it.

When students write an equation to represent the situation, and subsequently interpret the graph in terms of the situation, they are reasoning abstractly and quantitatively (MP2).