Scientific notation is a way of writing large or small numbers that have many digits in a simplified form. The index of the base 10 exponents indicates the number of digits there are after the decimal dot.
The table shows the population of 4 cities of Texas, Houston, San Antonio, El Paso, and Corpus Christi.
To determine the total population of all cities you have to add them together, the first step is to express each given population in standard form:
Houston:
This notation indicates that there are 6 digits after the decimal dot, the first one is 3 and the other five digits are zero. The positive index indicates that this number is greater than 1, so to write the number in the standard form you have to erase the decimal dot:
San Antonio:
The notation indicates that there are 6 digits after the decimal point, the first one is 5 and the other five digits are zero. The positive exponent indicates that this number is greater than 1, so you have to erase the decimal dot:
El Paso:
This population is already given in the standard form
Corpus Christi:
This notation indicates that there are 5 digits after the decimal dot, the first one is 5 and the next four are zero. The exponent is positive, so as mentioned before, this number is greater than one, and to write it in the standard form you have to erase the decimal dot:
Now that all values are expressed in the standard form you can add them:
In the standard form, the total population of the four cities is 4,800,000 people
To express this value using scientific notation you have to write the decimal dot after the first digit and then count the number of digits after the decimal dot.
When you use scientific notation you have to write only the digits that are different than zero.
There are 6 digits after the decimal dot, so the exponent of the base 10 number will be 6, and the result expressed in scientific notation is:
