Question

An egg of a certain kind of insect called a Tachinidae is 0.00002 meters long. What is this length in scientific notation?

Answer 1

2.0x10^-5 or 2.0E-5 —this is because as a small decimal number, you move the decimal to the right five spaces and then add a negative to the decimal to indicate that when you translate back (from scientific notation to 0.00002) you will move the decimal to the left

Answer 2

`2*10^(-5)`.

Explanation:

We have been given that an egg of a certain kind of insect called a Tachinidae is 0.00002 meters long. We are asked to write the length in scientific notation.

To write a number in scientific, we need to factors. One factor is between 0 and 10 and second is a power of 10.

The first factor will be 2.

Since our given number has 5 digits after decimal, so we will multiply 2 by 1 divided by 10 to the fifth power.

`0.00002=2*(1)/(10^5)`

Using exponent property
`(1)/(a^m)=a^(-m)`, we can write our expression as:

`0.00002=2*10^(-5)`

Therefore, the length in scientific notation would be
`2*10^(-5)`.