How do I use scientific notation to write 15,800?

1 Answer
Oct 11, 2014

Please check my answer to this question, especially my preliminary discussion.

http://socratic.org/questions/how-do-i-convert-scientific-notation-to-decimal

The one we need for this problem is to reverse the process.

Think of 15,800 as

#15,800.0 * 10^0#

Since we are reversing the process, moving the decimal place to the left will increase #10#'s power while moving to the right will reduce it.

We want to reduce 15800 to single digits. Hence, we need to move the decimal place 4 places to the left. Correspondingly, we need to increase #10#'s power by 4.

So, we have

#1.58 * 10^4#