A kite is a quadrilateral, meaning it has four sides. Like parallelograms, the four sides are made of two sets of congruent line segments--in other words, two sets of segments of the same length. However, unlike parallelograms, in which the congruent sides are opposite one another, a kite's congruent sides are adjacent to one another.. Each pair of congruent line segments meets at the opposite angle from the other.
The angles at which a kite's congruent sides meet can be different, but the angles where the sets of congruent pairs meet one another are identical and opposite one another. A specific type of kite known as a polykite has 120-, 90-, 60- and 90-degree angles, and edge ratios of the square root of 3 to 1. Kites are convex, meaning that they don't have any internal angles.
A kite's diagonals are the line segments that can be drawn to connect its opposite angles like the two crossed sticks in a flying kite, over which the material stretches. One of the kite's diagonals always bisects the other, cutting it precisely in half. Furthermore, the diagonals are perpendicular, intersecting each other at a right angle and forming four 90-degree angles where they meet.
You can find a kite's area by multiplying the lengths of the polygon diagonals together, then dividing that number in half. This formula is expressed as A = 1/2 pq. The "A" in the formula represents the area, and "p" and "q" are the lengths of the kite's two diagonals.