| Do you know this number,
300,000,000 m/sec.? It's the Speed of light ! Do you recognize this number,
0.000 000 000 753 kg. ? This is the mass of a dust
particle! Scientists have developed a shorter method
to express very large numbers. This method is called scientific notation.
Scientific Notation is based on powers of the base number 10.
The number 123,000,000,000 in scientific notation is written as :
The
first number 1.23 is called the coefficient. It must be greater than or
equal to 1 and less than 10. The second number
is called the base . It must always be 10 in scientific notation. The base
number 10 is always written in exponent form. In the number 1.23 x 1011
the number 11 is referred to as the exponent or power of ten. To
write a number in scientific notation:Put the decimal
after the first digit and drop the zeroes. 
In the number 123,000,000,000 The coefficient will
be 1.23 To find the exponent count the number of places
from the decimal to the end of the number. In 123,000,000,000
there are 11 places. Therefore we write 123,000,000,000 as:
Exponents
are often expressed using other notations. The number 123,000,000,000 can also
be written as: 1.23E+11 or as 1.23 X 10^11
For small numbers
we use a similar approach. Numbers less smaller than 1 will have a negative exponent.
A millionth of a second is: 0.000001 sec.
or 1.0E-6 or 1.0^-6 or For
online assessment question in scientific notation (including multiplication and
division problems) --- click
here. |