Signicant Figures
Is Non-zero number
Uses Of Signicant Figures
Significant Figure - OPERATION
The rules above are a bit technical, so here are some examples.
Example #1 - Suppose you wish to round 62.5347 to four significant figures. Look at the fifth digit. It is a 4, a number less than 5. Therefore, you will simply drop every digit after the fourth, and the original number rounds off to 62.53. (rule #1 above)
Example #2 - Round 3.78721 to three significant figures. Look at the fourth digit. It is 7, a number greater than 5, so you round the original number up to 3.79. (rule #2 above)
Example #3 - Round 726.835 to five significant figures. To do this, you must look at the sixth digit. It is a 5, so now you must look at the fifth digit also. That is a 3, which is an odd number, so you round the original number up to 726.84. (rule #3 above)
Example #4 - Round 24.8514 to three significant figures. Look at the fourth digit. It is a 5, so now you must also look at the third digit. It is 8, an even number, so you simply drop the 5 and the figures that follow it. The original number becomes 24.8. (rule #3 above)
Here are some more examples for rule #3.
Example #5 - Round 23.55 to the 0.1 place. To do this, you must look at the hundreths place (remember, we are going to keep the tenths place in our answer). It is a five, so now we look at the next digit inward (the tenth place) and see it is a five, an odd number. Since we are rounding off a 5 (in the hundreths place), we must round to an even number. The answer is 23.6.
Example #6 - Round 23.65 to the 0.1 place. To do this, you must look at the hundreths place (remember, we are going to keep the tenths place in our answer). It is a five, so now we look at the next digit inward (the tenth place) and see it is a six, an even number. Since we are rounding off a 5 (in the hundreths place), we must round to an even number. The answer is 23.6.
Comments
Post a Comment