So how you would answer this question is by finding the area of the sides. So the rectangle is 25 x 17 or 425 and there is 4 rectangles. You take the area of the rectangle and multiply it by 4, which would be 1700 and now you find the area of the square which is 17 x 17 or 289 and then you multiply that by 2 because there are two squares, 578 and you take that answer and put it with the area of the rectangles and you get your surface area. 2278 is the surface area of the rectangular prism. Another way to explain it is there are 6 sides so six areas and you just add the areas together to get the surface area. Hope this helps :D