Week 5: More power

Introduction

This week extends your study of exponents, or powers (Succeed with maths – Part 1 [Tip: hold Ctrl and click a link to open it in a new tab. (Hide tip)] provides an introduction to this). You’ll consider how to use these to write large and small numbers to make them easier to understand, write and work with. To do this, a system called scientific notation is used, based on different powers of ten, which allows small and large numbers to be written using fewer digits. Once such numbers have been rewritten this system enables calculations to be carried out with the numbers efficiently. Finally, this week will cover the operation that ‘undoes’ taking the power of a number – roots. This will all give you a good basis to continue your study in maths and many other subject areas, including technology and science.

Watch Maria introduce what this week involves:

Download this video clip.Video player: swim2_week_5.mp4

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Transcript

Maria Townsend:

This radio telescope can see over a thousand million million kilometres in to space. That’s a 1 followed by 15 zeroes. A very large number that is both inconvenient to read and write.

So instead of writing it like this a thousand million million can be written like this. One times 10 to the power of 15.

This is all based on powers of 10 as you’ll see this week.

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After this week's study, you should be able to:

• understand and use scientific notation
• perform calculations with numbers written in scientific notation
• understand and calculate square roots of a number.