How many square meters are contained in a rectangle of 12 meters long and 8 meters wide?

A square metre is measuring the area of something. Here, we calculate the area of a rectangle simply by multiplying the length by the width. So the area of this rectangle is:

12 * 8 = 96 square metres. You can think of it as 12 * 8 = 96 and a metre * a metre equals a square metre!