Succeed with maths – Part 2
◄Previous: 7 Summary

# Introduction

This week extends your study of exponents, or powers ( Succeed with maths – Part 1 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:

Active content not displayed. This content requires JavaScript to be enabled, and a recent version of Flash Player to be installed.
Transcript

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.

◄Contents►Next: 1 Big and small

OpenLearn - Succeed with maths – Part 2
Except for third party materials and otherwise, this content is made available under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 Licence, full copyright detail can be found in the acknowledgements section. Please see full copyright statement for details.