Question

The weight of a blue whale is about 200,000 kg, or 2 x 10^5 kg.The weight of a large whale shark is about 20,000 kg, or 2 x 10^4 kg.About how many times heavier is the blue whale than the whale shark?A. 180,000 timesB. 2 timesC. 1x 10^-1 timesO D. 1x10^1 times

Answer 1

In order to find the relation between the weight of the two whales we need to divide them. We want to know how many times heavier the blue whale is in relation to the whale shark, therefore we need to divide the weight of the blue whale by the weight of the shark. Both weights are given in scientific notation form, this makes things easier for us, because in that form we can divide the base and subtract the expoents. This is done below.

`\begin{gathered} \text{ratio =}(2\cdot10^5)/(2\cdot10^4) \\ \text{ratio = 1}\cdot10^((5-4)) \\ \text{ratio}=1\cdot10^1 \end{gathered}`

Therefore the result is 1*10^1 times, which would be the letter "D".