The distance from the earth to the moon is approximately 240,000 miles. What is this distance expressed in scientific notation?
To convert to scienti?c notation, place a decimal point after the ?rst non-zero digit to form a number among 1 and 10-in this case, between the 2 and the 4. Count the number of decimal places from which decimal to the place of the decimal in the original number. In this case, the number of places would be 5. This number, 5, becomes the exponent of 10 and is positive since the original number was greater than one. The answer then is 2.4 × 105.