scientific notation, its uses and rules for calculations. One example from everyday life: a computer hard disk holds 4 gigabytes of information, that is 4,000,000,000 bytes of information. Written in scientific notation, that is 4 X 109 bytes.

Scientific notation is used to write very large and very small numbers. While ordinary numbers are useful for everyday measurements, for large measurements like astronomical distances, scientific notations offers a way of expressing very large and small numbers in a concise way.

Scientific notation is based on powers of ten. Because many large and small numbers consist of just a few integers plus many zeros, the power of ten can be used to shorten the length of the written number.

A number that is written in correct scientific notation is made up of three parts. The first part, the coefficient, is a number between 1 and 10. The second part, the base,...
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