Question

The height of a parallelogram is 8 units more than the base. The measure of the base of the parallelogram is 12 units. What is the area, in square units, of the parallelogram?

Answer 1

If you look at a diagram of a parallelogram and draw vertical lines through the vertices that will cut off small triangles, you'll see that those triangles are congruent.
Therefore the area is the same as for a rectangle with the same base and height.