Week One - Thursday 22nd April

Today we looked at representing numbers in standard form. This is a special way of writing a number that is useful for very big or very small numbers. There are 3 steps:

1. Move the decimal point in the number to straight after the first digit. e.g 3002 becomes 3.002, 74.8 becomes 7.48, and 5.89 stays as 5.89
2. Count the number of places the decimal point has moved, in the examples above this is 3 (remember a decimal point is always at the end of a whole number), then 1 and then 0.
3. The number in standard form is then the new number multiplied by 10 to the power of the number of places moved.

e.g. 3002 = 3.002 x 10^3
74.8 = 7.48 x 10^1
5.89 = 5.89 x 10^0

Homework: 6.04 and 6.05