Whole Numbers: Powers of 10

Powers of 10 are a way of representing very large or very small whole numbers using exponents. In this system, 10 is raised to a certain power to represent the number of zeros in the number. For example:

• 10^0 = 1
• 10^1 = 10
• 10^2 = 100
• 10^3 = 1,000
• 10^4 = 10,000

Each time the exponent increases by 1, the value of the power of 10 increases by a factor of 10. For example, 10^3 is 10 times greater than 10^2. One single example of using powers of 10 is to represent the distance from the Earth to the Sun, which is approximately 93 million miles or 93,000,000 miles in standard form. In powers of 10, this distance can be written as 9.3 x 10^7 miles.