Chapter 1
Linear Equations and Graphing
Course: Gre
Subject: Gre Quantitative Reasoning
Chapter: Foundations Of Functions And Composition
Introduction: Making Large and Small Numbers Manageable
Scientists frequently work with extremely large numbers (like the distance to the sun) and extremely small numbers (like the size of an atom). Writing these numbers in standard decimal form is cumbersome and error-prone. Scientific notation provides a compact, standardized way to represent very large and very small numbers.
What Is Scientific Notation?
Scientific notation is a way of writing numbers as a product of two parts:
- A number greater than or equal to 1 but less than 10
- A power of 10
a × 10^n
where:
- 1 ≤ a < 10
- n is an integer (positive, negative, or zero)
Examples
| Number | Scientific Notation | | 34,000,000 | 3.4 × 10⁷ | | 0.0000613 | 6.13 × 10⁻⁵ | | 200 | 2 × 10² | | 0.0099 | 9.9 × 10⁻³ |