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How to describe 2D shapes

2D shapes can be described by their sides, their angles and their symmetry.

  • The sides might be equal in length and some might be parallel.

  • The angles could be right angles, but sometimes they are greater than or less than a right angle.

  • A 2D shape could have line symmetry or rotation symmetry, or both!

Various 2D shapes, including a triangle, square, pentagon, hexagon, heptagon and octagon
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How to describe 3D shapes

3D shapes are described by their faces, edges and vertices.

The faces can be the same shape or different, and a 3D shape could have a curved surface as well as flat faces.

Various 3D shapes, including sphere, cube, cuboid, cone, cylinder and prism.
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Example 1

Dawn describes a 2D shape as having 4 right angles. What shape could it be?

Character and question mark
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Example 2

Bruce draws this quadrilateral. How can we describe it?

Rhombus

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Example 3

Sophie draws this triangle. How can we describe it?

right angled triangle

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Example 4

Mika draws a shape with 5 equal sides and 5 equal angles. What is her shape?

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Example 5

Chloe notices that her 3D shape has 5 flat faces. 4 of the faces are triangles.

She also counts that it has 8 edges and 5 vertices. What is her shape?

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Quiz

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More on 3D shapes

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