

1dm means 1 decimetre or 1×10 -1m = 0.1m.The prefixes that you need to know, with their multiplication factors and symbols are given in the table below, The distance to the moon is 384,400,000 metres, which is 384,400 kilometres or 384,400km. The symbol for kilo is k, so instead of writing kilometre we can just write km. The prefix “ kilo ” means multiply by 1000 so a kilometre is 1000 metres. If we want to save even more time then we don’t even write the prefix, but just write the symbol for the prefix.Į.g. If we know the prefix then we know how big the unit is. The name of the new unit is the same as the standard unit, but it also has a “ prefix” to tell us how many powers of 10 it is multiplied by. To make life easy, we invent new units of measurement that are just the same as the standard ones, but multiplied or divided by a power of 10. We could also make this number easier to deal with by changing the unit of measurement. We could write this answer in Standard Form ( click here for details). The distance from the earth to the moon is 384,400,000m. The most disturbing part of the study is a proposal by Edward Teller, the Strangelovian inventor of the hydrogen bomb, to produce a 10 gigaton (10,000 megaton) warhead that would detonate with an.

If we get an answer from a calculation that is very large or very small it can be inconvenient to write out all the zeros before of after the decimal point.
