Brief Review of Scientific Notation

Yesterday, we taught you the basics of unit conversion.

Today, we will guide you through more questions that are complicated but not so hard if you follow our way.

First, before we do any questions, we need to review SCIENTIFIC NOTATION.

Scientific notations are used to express really big and really small numbers such as 500billion or 0.000000000000003333 using powers of 10.

One thing to note here is that the number that is constant is bigger or equal to 1 but less than 10.

Example:

Express 25,100,000,000 in scientific notation.

First we need to make a constant number that is more than 1 but less than 10.

As you can see, I made a constant number from the original number.

In this case, the number we need is 2.51

The Next step is to count the zeros from the original decimal to the decimal of 2.51




              

 







On the above, I moved the original decimal point to the new decimal point.

As I did that I counted how many digits until the decimal of 2.51. In this case there are 10 digits.

Now you put all of it together.

Take the constant number and multiply it at the 8th power of 10

The result would be 2.51 x 10^8

I hope that you will have an easier time with scientific notations and hopefully with unit conversions.

See you next time!

Written by: JK (Sept 21,2010)