Big Numbers And Scientific Notation  More Resources 

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What is scientific notation? The concept of very large or very small numbers is something that is difficult for many students to comprehend. Scientific notation is a way to write very small or very large numbers in a notation that gives us an idea of relative size -- without all those (sometimes) overwhelming zeros! For example, when we see the number 1000000000000, we have to do a lot of work to determine how many 0's there are. Using scientific notation, we can write the same number like this: 1 x 1012. It is telling us that there are 12 zeros after the 1. A number like 1760000000 can be written like so: 1.76 x 109. Very small numbers use the same type of notation only the exponent on the 10 is usually a negative number. For example, 0.000000000342 would be written 3.42 x 10-10 using scientific notation. That means that we moved the decimal 10 places to the right (when we wrote 3.42). http://serc.carleton.edu/quantskills/methods/BigNumbers.html 10-20 = 0.00000000000000000001 10-4 = 0.0001 10-3 = 0.001 10-2 = 0.01 10-1 = 0.1 100 = 1 101 = 10 102 = 100 103 = 1000 104 = 10,000 105 = 100,000 1020 = 100000000000000000000 Comparing the Numbers? Two numbers written in scientific notation can be compared. The number with the larger power of 10 is greater than the number with the smaller power of 10. If the powers of ten are the same then the number with the larger factor is the larger number. For example, 3.4x107 is greater than 3.4x104. The number 3.4x107 is greater than 3.1x107. http://www.aaamath.com/cmp71h-comparenumsci.html Questions 1. Put the following list in order from biggest to smallest. 1.0 x 106 12 x 10-5 1.2 x 106 7.6 x 10-3 7.4 x 10-3 1.2 x 10-4 1.3 x 105 0.1 x 104 1.7 x 10-36 1.7 x 1023 1.3 x 1018 2. Convert the following into standard format 2 x 104 3 x 106 1 x 10-3 1.3 x 106 3.2 x 10-6 33 x 10-4 3. Convert the following into scientific notation format 23000 120000 4500 0.002 0.0000067 0.0012 45000000000000000