Answer:
The radius of the bacterium in scientific notation is 3.15 x 10^(-7) meters (since it is expressed in picometers, not peer meters).
To express this number in standard form, we need to move the decimal point 7 places to the right, since the exponent is negative. This gives us:
3.15 x 10^(-7) = 0.000000315 meters
So the radius of the bacterium in standard form is 3.15 x 10^(-7) meters = 0.000000315 meters.
What is Scientific Notation?
Scientific notation is a way of expressing numbers that are very large or very small in a more compact and convenient form. It is commonly used in science, engineering, and mathematics to represent numbers that are too big or small to be easily written out in full.
In scientific notation, a number is expressed as a product of a coefficient and a power of 10. The coefficient is a number between 1 and 10, and the power of 10 indicates how many places the decimal point is moved to the right or left to get the original number. If the original number is greater than 1, the exponent is positive; if the original number is less than 1, the exponent is negative.
For example, the number 3,000,000 can be written in scientific notation as 3 x 10^6, which means 3 times 10 raised to the power of 6, or 3 followed by 6 zeros. Similarly, the number 0.00000005 can be written as 5 x 10^(-8), which means 5 times 10 raised to the power of negative 8, or 8 zeros followed by 5.
Scientific notation is useful because it allows us to write very large or small numbers in a more concise and readable form. It also makes it easier to perform calculations with such numbers, because we can simply add or subtract the exponents and multiply or divide the coefficients.