Question

i need help with sig figs!
what would 0.525702 be in 3 sig figs?
my answer was wrong: 7.02e^-4

Answer 1

With significant figures you work from left to right.
It seems from your answer 7.02^e-4 that you were choosing the numbers from the wrong side of the number.
So if we need 3 significant figures of 0.525702, we would choose these from the left side of the number. So, we have:
0.525
Just one more thing has to be done - rounding. We look at the next significant firgure which is a seven and so to three significant figures the number is:
0.526