Exponents and Scientific Notation

Explaining how to do exponents,
I'm going to teach you how to do exponents. An example of an exponent would be 7 to the power of 3. Which is the number 7 with a little 3 in the upper right hand corner of the 7. How you would figure out what the answer is, you would have to do a procedure that looks like this . You would have to multiply 7 x 7 which equals 49. Then 49 x 7 which equals 343. The reason you do this is because 7 has to be multiplied by it's self 3 times.

Scientific Notation
To figure out scientific notation you would have to do this. Lets say the number is 4,200,000. You have to put the numbers before the 0's at the beginning of the answer, which would be 42, then you put a decimal point right after the first number which would make it 4.2. Then you would count how many spots you moved to the right of the decimal point that would be the power. Then you write 4.2 x 10 to the power of 6. You would write 10 because with every spot that you move to the right past the 2 you make a 0.


Talking about Power, Base, and exponents.
Usually, a power is represented with a base number and an exponent. The base number tells what number is being multiplied. The exponent, a small number written above and to the right of the base number, tells how many times the base number is being multiplied.

How you can use exponents in the real world.
One example of how exponents do kind of connect with our everyday lives: when we speak about square feet, square meters, square inches, square miles, square kilometers or any other area units, or when we speak about cubic feet, cubic meters, cubic centimeters or any other such volume units.
If you talk about SQUARE shaped areas, for example if you say "My room is twelve by twelve square", you're meaning your room is 12 feet x 12 feet, or 122 square feet.
Another kind of indirect example is if you talk about extremely tiny or extremely big quantities. For example, the term 'nanometer' means 10-9 meter. The prefix 'nano' means the number 10-9 - an extremely small number. Or, within computer world you often see megabytes, gigabytes, terabytes. "Mega" means 106 or one million, "giga" means 109, and "tera" means 1012. Or megahertz - million hertz.