TEAS Basics: The Foundation
A simple, clear introduction to scientific notation with real nursing applications
In the medical field, you'll encounter very large and very small numbers. For example, a single dose of medication might contain billions of molecules, or a patient's lab results might show a white blood cell count in the thousands per microliter of blood. Writing these numbers out with all their zeros can be cumbersome and lead to errors.
Scientific notation is simply a shorthand way to write these long numbers. It makes them easier to read, write, and compare.
Think of it like this: instead of writing "one million," you can write "1 × 10⁶". The "6" tells you how many places to move the decimal point to the right. For very small numbers, the exponent is negative, telling you to move the decimal to the left.
A patient's lab results show a red blood cell count of 4,500,000 cells per microliter.
This is much quicker to write and less prone to errors on a patient's chart. The exponent "6" tells us the decimal point moved 6 places to the left to create the shorter form.
Large Numbers
When you have a large number (like 5,800,000), the exponent is positive. The bigger the exponent, the larger the number.
Small Numbers
When you have a small number (like 0.000072), the exponent is negative. The more negative the exponent, the smaller the number.