The flow of water in a stream is 210,000 liters per hour. Use scientific notation to calculate the amount of water that flows in a week (168 hours).

Question

I need help with a sciene question on using sceintific notation

Answer 1

Scientific notation uses a smaller, manageable number, multiplied by 10 to an exponent, which is determined by how many places the decimal point is moved to the left of some quite large number. In this problem, you can convert 210,000 to 2.1 x 10^5 (I moved the decimal point from the far right of 210,000, 5 places, to be between the 2 and the 1. Now, multiply 2.1 x 10^5 times 168 to get 352.8 x 10^5, and now you can move the decimal 2 more places to the left, as well as increasing the exponent by 2, thus the answer is 3.528 x 10^7 liters per week.