Welcome to this deck on standard form. In science and maths, we often deal with numbers that are incredibly large, like the distance to a star, or incredibly small, like the size of a cell. Writing all the zeros for these numbers is inconvenient and can lead to mistakes. Standard form is a neat and tidy way to write these numbers down.

Standard form always follows the same pattern: a number, multiplied by a power of 10. The first number must be between 1 and 10. For example, instead of writing five hundred, which is 500, we write 5 times 10 to the power of 2.

Let's learn how to write a large number in standard form. Take the number 60,000. First, we place a decimal point to make a number between 1 and 10. That gives us 6. Then, we count how many places the decimal point moved from the end of the number. It moved 4 places. So, 60,000 in standard form is 6 times 10 to the power of 4.