Most people do not immediately know what the numbers a and k stand for when they see 0.51 written in scientific notation. This blog post will help you understand! In the following equation, a is the first digit after the decimal point and k represents how many digits there are to the right of it.
When you see 0.51 written in scientific notation, then: a = .05 k = one (because there’s only one number to the right) The common mistake people make when reading numbers in this form is that they assume that each digit on either side of zero has equal weight or value; this is not necessarily true. In other words, if you have two consecutive zeros and five ones between them -0050- then 50% more than 37500 would be 62500 because we can’t actually count all those zeros on both sides of ‘zero’; as an alternative, we can write it as a number with a decimal point in between the digits -0.62500-.
In general, 0 is written as ‘0’ and not ‘.00’. This helps people to stay on track because they don’t have to count all of those zeros when reading! -0050 becomes 50.00 or .05 (as mentioned above) which means that 50% more than 37500 would be 62500 -500.25 becomes 502 (not 50075). We can’t really count all the trailing zeroes so we just put what’s left at the end into one digit: five hundred two instead of fifty thousand seven hundred seventy five.)
