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Mathematicians at the University of Hawaii have tried to approximate the total number of grains of sand on the world's beaches. They calculated 7,500,000,000,000,000,000, or seven quintillion five hundred quadrillion. How is this number expressed in scientific notation?

User Almas
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2 Answers

11 votes
Answer: Because numbers are infinite. Explanation: you can count to 100 but the numbers dont stop there, if you were to count contentiously then you would find yourself in a loop of numbers.

1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 | 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20

Because as you can see the numbers do not change 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 are just in different places
User Hywel Rees
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7 votes

7.5 × 10¹⁸

In order to transform in standard form / scientific notation.

Count the zeros in a number.

  • the first number should be an absolute value like: a * b^10

thus in scientific notation: 7.5 × 10¹⁸

another example:

  • number: 650,000,000
  • scientific notation: 6.5 × 10⁸
User Lal Krishna
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