Question

What is the surface area and what do I need to do?

Answer 1

check the picture below, that's pretty much the same block, or "rectangular prism", with a width of 10, length of 5 and height of 1.

so anyhow, is really 6 rectangles stacked up to each other at the edges, so, we can simply get the area of each of those rectangles, add them up and that's the surface area.

front and back, two rectangles of  5x1

left and right, two rectangles of 1x10

top and bottom, two rectangles of 10x5

$\bf \stackrel{\textit{front and back}}{2(5\cdot 1)}+\stackrel{\textit{left and right}}{2(1\cdot 10)}+\stackrel{\textit{top and bottom}}{2(10\cdot 5)}$