Today, we are going to learn some Pentagon facts for kids. Welcome to the Pentagon! Located in Arlington, Virginia, just across the river from Washington, D.C., the Pentagon is the headquarters of the United States Department of Defence. It is one of the most famous and recognisable buildings in the entire world, not just because it’s a “mini-city” where over 26,000 people work, but because of its very unusual shape.
As you might have guessed from its name, the building has five sides, five floors above ground, and five rings of hallways! It was built in record speed during World War II to bring all the different branches of the military—the Army, Navy, and Air Force—together under one giant roof.
Despite being one of the largest office buildings on Earth (you could fit the entire U.S. Capitol building inside just one of its five sections!), its clever design means you can walk between any two points in the building in just seven minutes. Get ready to march through five amazing facts about this “fortress of defense” that is as strong as it is unique.
A pentagon is a five-sided shape, they are polygons with five straight sides. A pentagon is formed from three triangles, so the sum of angles in a pentagon = 3 × 180° = 540°.
The definition of pentagon shape is derived from the Greek word as “Penta” denotes five, and “gon” denotes angle. The pentagon is a 5-sided polygon.
Pentagons can be categorized into regular and irregular Pentagons. Here are the differences:
On a regular pentagon All the interior angles and the sides are equal.
On an irregular pentagon All the interior angles and the sides are of different measures.
There are also Convex and Concave pentagons. On a convex pentagon all the interior angles are < 180°, and the vertices point outwards. On a Concave pentagon one or more interior angles are > 180°, and the vertices point inwards.
The perimeter of a regular or irregular pentagon is the distance around its five sides. It is the sum of its sides. Perimeter of a Pentagon = (side1 + side2 +side3 + side4 + side5) units.
We hope you enjoyed learning about pentagons, check out these articles about some other shapes: Polygons, Geometric Shapes, Isosceles Triangle and 2D and 3D Shapes.
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