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Scientific notation

Scientific notation

From the course: Test Prep: GRE

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Scientific notation

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- [Voiceover] Another concept related to exponents is scientific notation. So you may recognize scientific notation as just a way of writing numbers in a notation kind of like this. And what this is really telling us, it's kind of just shorthand. This is telling us that we take two point three and then we add six zeros to it or we move the decimal place six to the right. So if I do that, I'm going to go, move it, one, two, three, four, five, six and that number looks like it is two point three million. So it's just a way of notating numbers differently. It's kind of shorthand for big numbers. So some situations that you might run into with scientific notation is if you have to maybe multiply or divide numbers. And let's think about that. What if I had something like, let's say, same number, two point three times 10 to the 6th. Let's say I had that over eight point seven times 10 to the 4th. So just a handy tip here, since we can multiply and divide in any order, what we can do…

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