Question

Practice: Organizing InformationComplete the chart to describe the exponents laws and rules.

Answer 1

Following the generalized form that you wrote, you know that a negative exponent sends its base to the denominator (or numerator if it's in the denominator already). Or to put it formally as you wrote it, for any nonzero real number a and natural number n, the negative rule of exponents states that $a^{-n} = \frac{1}{a^n}$.

So, $6^{-2}= \frac{1}{6^{2}} = \frac{1}{36}$.