Question

Practice: Activating Prior Knowledge

Write three real-world examples of quantities that you would use scientific notation to express.
(Hint:What measurements are really large or really tiny?)

Answer 1

Scientific notation is used to write really large numbers, or really small numbers using less digits. For example:

1. Earth's distance from the sun 150,000,000 kilometers. We can rewrite this in scientific notation as 1.5 x
`10^(8)`

2. The length of a skin cell is 0.00003 meters. We can rewrite this in scientific notation as 3.0 x
`10^(-5)`

3. The world population is about 7,000,000,000. We can rewrite this in scientific notation as 7 x
`10^(9)`