Exponents, in scientific notation

Scientific notation uses exponents to express numbers. The number 1,000, for instance, is equal to 10 x 10 x 10, or 10. The number of zeros following the 1 in 1,000 is 3, the same as the exponent in scientific notation. Similarly, 10,000, with 4 zeros, would be 10 , and so on. The same rules apply to numbers that are not even multiples of 10. For example, the number 1,360 is 1.36 x 10. And the number of atoms in a spoonful of water becomes an easy-to-write 5 X 10. ... 

To make working with such extreme numbers easier, chemists turn to scientific notation, which is a special kind of exponential notation. Exponential notation simply means writing a number in a way that includes exponents. In scientific notation, every number is written as the product of two numbers, a coefficient and a power of 10. In plain old exponential notation, a coefficient can be any value of a number multiplied by a power with a base of 10 (such as 10" ). But scientists have rules for coefficients in scientific notation. In scientific notation, the coefficient is always at least 1 and always less than 10. For example, the coefficient could be 7, 3.48, or 6.0001. 

For numbers larger than 1, the exponent in scientific notation is a positive whole number, as illustrated above. For numbers less than 1, the exponent is a negative whole number that indicates the number of times the coefficient must be divided by 10 (or multiplied by 0.1) to give the number represented in scientific notation... 

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