Question

What would be the value of expressing something like the national debt in scientific notation? What information would be lost in such a usage? Is that important? Explain why or why not

Answer 1

Depends on accuracy you use. You can always say something like 1.95839831231*10^13. Normally you'd see something like 1.958*10^13. You loose some precision and some significant figures. Importance depends on the situations. If you are doing calculations it's bad. If you are reporting they only need to know roughly, so you'd say something like 1.96 Trillion
Note that this isn't the actual debt just some random number