What are the rules of Significant figures and What are Significant values?
If I offered you some money between $ 1,000 and $ 10,000, how much would you want? I'm sure if you ponder your answer, this is the first digit that is important to you as it tells you exactly how many thousands you would get.
It gives meaning to certain digits in a number. Scientists use significant digits to get more accurate information about measurements and other numerical data. These digits also help you round very large or very small numbers .
Significant digits are certain digits that have meaning or meaning and provide more precise information about the value of the number.
If I offered you $ 2,000 in our opening scenario, the 2 in 2000 matters because it tells exactly how many thousands.
Lets suppose two people were running a race. Runner 1 took 30.
01 seconds and runner 2 took 30. 02 seconds. Who would win the race? Obviously runner 1 because he took less time. All of those numbers are significant because we need them all to tell us exactly who won the race.
Counting significant digits
So how do we decide what is significant?
To find the number of significant digits in a number, we have to literally count each individual digit, for example, one hundred and forty is written as 140, it has a 1, a 4 and a 0, it has 3 digits, but not To find out which ones are important, we need to follow a few rules.
Rule 1: Any non-zero digit is significant
Anywhere you see a digit, it's not zero, count it; it's significant.
Let's look at some examples:
456 has 3 significant digits
68.
29 has 4 significant digits
All other rules have to do with the number zero.
Sometimes zero is insignificant and sometimes it is. To remember the rules of zero, let's pretend two adults and a child are walking down the street. The adults, like the digits, are non-zero, and the child would be zero.
Rule 2: Zeros between non-zero digits are always significant
In relation to our adults and when a
child walks down the street, the child is always okay with between two Adult to go.
Let's look at some examples:
5.609 has 4 significant digits.
700.
0879 has 7 significant digits
Rule 3: Zeros before nonzero digits are never significant
These are called leading zeros.
It is okay for the child to be far ahead of adults who walk alone.
Notice that 8 * (1/1000) = 0.008 and 37 * (1/1000) = 0.0037.
We know that we are multiplying by 1/1000; that doesn't change, but when the value in front changes, the result changes; therefore, only that part is significant.
Let's see some examples:
0.
067 has 2 significant digits 40a 40.
000008 has 1 significant digit 40a 4098 has 2 significant digits
Rule 4: Zeros after
nonzero digits are sometimes significant
We have two cases for rule 4 Note that the
In this way, it is sometimes safe for the child to be behind (or to follow) adults, only in the case of danger.
