Let’s now talk about powers. Powers are very useful in math,
and provide a convenient way of writing multiplication problems that
have many repeated terms.
Example
For 63 we say that 6 is the base and 3 is the power or
exponent.
This means that we multiply 6 by itself 3 times.
63 = 6 x 6 x 6 = 216
There are a few special cases of exponents that we should talk
about, specifically when we have an exponent of 1, 0 or a negative
number.
In general, any number x raised to a power of 1 is x. Where as
any number x raised to the power of zero is one. When we have a
negative number as the power the result is 1/x.
These rules are important especially when we are trying to solve
algebraic equations. |
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