Question

How do I use scientific notation to write 15,800?

Answer 1

Please check my answer to this question, especially my preliminary discussion.

http://socratic.org/questions/how-do-i-convert-scientific-notation-to-decimal

The one we need for this problem is to reverse the process.

Think of 15,800 as

`15,800.0 * 10^0`

Since we are reversing the process, moving the decimal place to the left will increase `10`'s power while moving to the right will reduce it.

We want to reduce 15800 to single digits. Hence, we need to move the decimal place 4 places to the left. Correspondingly, we need to increase `10`'s power by 4.

So, we have

`1.58 * 10^4`