From the course: Preparing for the GMAT

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Scientific notation

Scientific notation

From the course: Preparing for the GMAT

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Scientific notation

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- [Instructor] So what do people do when numbers get really unwieldy like the distance between the Earth and the sun in inches? Well, a lot of times they write those numbers in scientific notation. So in this video, we'll learn the basics of scientific notation and how to work with numbers written that way. So let's just make up a number here. Let's just say I had 4.5 times 10 to the seventh. I was like okay, well, this is scientific notation. It's always going to be like a ones digit point a decimal so it's going to be like 4.5. You're not usually going to see scientific notation like 45 point something. It's always going to be a ones digit point something and it's going to be times 10 to a power. And really all this means, if we wrote it out, is that we would take 4.5 and move the decimal place seven spots to the right so we would just go one, two, three, four, five, six, seven and then I'll rewrite that just for clarity sake, 4500000, one, two three, one, two, three, and then we…

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