Daisy cut a square out of a sheet of graph paper . the square had an area of 16 square cm. she then trimmed one cm from each side of the square. what is the area of the smaller square?

If the area was 16cm^2 before, then each side was 4 cm long since each side of a square is equal, and the area for a square is the length of the sides squared. The square root of 16 is 4, so that is why the sides were 4 cm. When you make each side 1 cm shorter, they're now all 3 cm. 3^2 is 9, so the new area is 9 square centimeters.