Question

How do you use an exponent to be present a number such as 16

Answer 1

Maybe this can help you

This sounds like you're asking about a binary floating 
point format, though I'm not positive because of the 
vocabulary you use. I interpret "characteristic" to mean 
"exponent" and "significand" as "fraction" (or "mantissa"). 

If that's true, then you've described: 

sign(1) + binary fraction(20) + binary exponent(10) 

Note that there are other possible interpretations (for 
example, a base-16 exponent). 

Since I'm assuming a binary exponent, we can use the same 
trick that IEEE 754 floating point standard does, and assume 
an "implicit" leading "1" to the fraction portion. This 
trick means that the fractional part will be between 
the following numbers (in base 2): 

1.00000000000000000000 (1 followed by twenty zeros)