Question

The amounts of food waste generated in a region during two years were 37,500,000 tons and 30,400,000 tons. What was the total food waste generated over these two years in the region, expressed in scientific notation?

Answer 1

You can change the form of the number to scientific notation before or after you do the addition. Here, we see the sum will be less than 100 million tons, so we can convert to scientific notation before we do the addition without requiring extra steps. The total waste is the sum of the amounts of waste in the two years.

... 3.75×10⁷ + 3.04×10⁷ = (3.75 +3.04)×10⁷ = 6.79×10⁷ . . . tons