Bristlecone pine<span>Until 2013, the oldest individual tree in the world was Methuselah, a 4,845-year-old Great Basin bristlecone pine (Pinus longaeva) in the White Mountains of California</span>
No problem, and you already know all about it.
Here are a few examples of same volume / different weight:
-- A bottle full of water is heavier than the same bottle when it's full of air.
-- Stones are heavier than styrofoam chunks the same size.
-- A bowl of meat loaf is heavier than a bowl of scrambled eggs.
In each example, two things have the same volume, but one weighs more than
the other. I didn't say anything about mass yet, but that's easy: As long as you
keep everything on Earth, more weight means more mass.
So how come, in each example, things with the same volume have different mass ?
This was your original question.
The answer is just the simple fact that there are millions of different substances, and
each different substance packs a different amount of mass into the same volume.
The amount of mass that a substance packs into a standard volume is called
the <em>density</em> of the substance. Meat loaf is more dense than scrambled eggs.
Stone is more dense than styrofoam. Water is more dense than air. And <em>gold</em>
is 19 times as dense as water. If you have a jar that holds a pound of water, and
you pour out the water and fill the jar with gold, the same jar holds 19 pounds of gold,
because the density of gold is 19 times the density of water.
The reason you were assigned to think about this question for homework is that
next time your Physics class meets, you'll start talking about <em>Density. </em><em /> And you're
all ready for it now.
It makes calculations with very large and small numbers easier.
Scientific notation is a system used in order to It makes calculations with very large and small numbers easier. It is useful as it allows very large number that would take a lot of space to write otherwise, and it allows them to be calculated easier. 
for example is a incredible large number, but written in this form is immediately understandable and useful for calculation.
