First moment of area

The first moment of area is like counting how much space something has. You know how when you count, you have to start at 1 and keep adding up the numbers to get your total? It's kind of like that, but instead of counting numbers, we are counting how much space something takes up.

To figure out the first moment of area, we need to measure two things: the distance from the object's center (a spot that we choose as the "middle") and how much of the object is there. Imagine we are trying to figure out the first moment of area of a rectangle. We would measure the distance from the center of the rectangle to one of its sides two times: once vertically and once horizontally. Then we would multiply those numbers together to get the total amount of space the rectangle takes up.

This is important because sometimes we need to know how strong an object is. If we know how much space it takes up, we can figure out how much stress it can handle without breaking. So even though the first moment of area is a bit tricky to understand, it's super important in figuring out how strong things are!