Question

What is the scientific notation for 8 million?

Answer 1

`8*10^6`

Explanation:

`8` million is `8000000`, which in turn can be written as `8*1000000`

This is exactly the idea behind scientific notation: you are interested in the magnitude of the number (in this case millions), and so you express numbers as a certain coefficient times the most significative magnitude.

In this case we literally say "eight millions", which means that the coefficient is `8` and the number is of the order of millions in magnitude.

The last step is to write `1000000` as `10^6`. In fact, each time we multiply by `10` we add a zero at the end of the number, so `1000000` is just a one followed by six zeroes, which means that we multiplied six times by `10`.