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A.14 These appendices in mathematics are intended as a brief review of operations and B.1 Scientific Notation Many quantities that scientists deal with often have very large or very small values. For and so on. The number of zeros corresponds to the power to which 10 is raised, called exponent of 10. For example, the speed of light, 300 000 000 m/s, can be ex- pressed as 3 ! 10 8 m/s. In this method, some representative numbers smaller than unity are In these cases, the number of places the decimal point is to the left of the digit 1 scientific nota- tion. For example, the scientific notation for 5 943 000 000 is 5.943 ! 10 9 and that for 0.000 083 2 is 8.32 ! 10 " 5 . When numbers expressed in scientific notation are being multiplied, the following general rule is very useful: (B.1) 10 n ! 10 m # 10 n$m 10 " 5 # 1 10 ! 10 ! 10 ! 10 ! 10 # 0.000 01 10 " 4 # 1 10 ! 10 ! 10 ! 10 # 0.000 1 10 " 3 # 1 10 ! 10 ! 10 # 0.001 10 " 2 # 1 10 ! 10 # 0.01 10 " 1 # 1 10 # 0.1 10 0 # 1 10 1 # 10 10 2 # 10 ! 10 # 100 10 3 # 10 ! 10 ! 10 # 1000 10 4 # 10 ! 10 ! 10 ! 10 # 10 000 10 5 # 10 ! 10 ! 10 ! 10 ! 10 # 100 000 Appendix B • Mathematics Review |