A large crowd attending a celebration in a metropolitan area was described in the morning newspaper the next day as about 450,000 people. A chemistry student stated that, mindful of the purpose of using scientific notation, this should be correctly expressed in scientific notation as 4.50000 × 10⁵. The chemistry student is correct in how to represent the crowd size using scientific notation.

Question

Quizplus · Accepted Answer

In scientific notation, only significant figures are used. The correct representation is 4.5 × 10^5, as the trailing zeros are not significant.

A Large Crowd Attending a Celebration in a Metropolitan Area