What is the general format of the scientific notation?

Answer 1

The general form of a number in scientific notation is

a x 10b, where b is an integer, and 1 <= a < 10.
Scientific notation is a convinient way of writing numbers that are either very big, or very small (close to zero).

If you have a power of 10, like 100,000, you can write it as 105.

If you have another number, that is not a power of 10, for example 200,000, you can write it as 2 x 105, whereas 250,000 would be 2.5 x 105.

In general, a number in scientific notation is any number, multiplied by a power of 10. In standard form, this "any number" will be a number between 1 and 10 (excluding 10), but it doesn't need be written this way. A power of 1000 is sometimes easier to read. For example, 28 x 109 is clearly 28 billion. (The standard notation would be 2.8 x 1010.)