Final Answer:
There are 9,000 natural numbers less than 100,000 where 9 is the first digit.
Step-by-step explanation:
To find the natural numbers less than 100,000 with 9 as the first digit, we need to consider all the numbers in the range from 1 to 99,999. In this range, any number starting with 9 will be a valid candidate. The counting starts from 9000 (9000, 9001, 9002, ...) and goes up to 9999. There are 9,000 such numbers.
The reason for this is that for the first digit, we have 10 options (0 to 9), and only one of these options is 9. For the remaining digits, we have 10 options each. Therefore, the total number of natural numbers less than 100,000 with 9 as the first digit is given by multiplying the options for each digit:

This calculation is based on the fundamental principle of counting, which states that if there are
ways to do the second task, and so on, then the total number of ways to perform all tasks is
In this case, choosing the first digit as 9 is the first task, and for each subsequent digit, there are 10 options.