Question

In 2018, there were about 41 million teenagers (ages 10-19) in the United States. They each sent an average of 800 text messages per month. About how many text messages did all of the teenagers in the United States send each month? Express your answer using scientific notation.

Answer 1

3.28*10^(10) text messages.

Explanation:

We know that there are about 41,000,000 teenagers in the US.

If each one of they sent an average of 800 text messages, then the total number of text messages sent in a month is something about:

Total number of messages = 41,000,000*800 = 32,800,000,000

Now we want to write this in scientific notation.

To do it, we need to count the number of digits at the left of the decimal point, if there are N total digits, we can write our number as:

3.28*10^(N - 1)

Where we now have only one digit at the left of the decimal point.

Here we have 11 digits.

Then we can write this number as:

3.28*10^(11 - 1)

3.28*10^(10)