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:

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.