An average American household uses about 1.04 x 10^4 kWh (kilowatt hours) of electricity a year. If a power station generates 2.496 x 10^10 kWh per year, how many households can it serve? Write your answer in scientific notation, expressed to the exact decimal place.
To find the number of households that can be served by the power station, we need to divide the total energy generated by the power station by the energy used by an average household.
Let's calculate this:
Number of households = Total energy generated / Energy used by an average household
Number of households = (2.496 x 10^10 kWh) / (1.04 x 10^4 kWh)
To divide these numbers, we need to subtract the exponents of the powers of 10:
Number of households = 2.496 x 10^10 / 1.04 x 10^4
When dividing, we subtract exponents: 10^10 / 10^4 = 10^(10-4) = 10^6
Now we divide the coefficients: 2.496 / 1.04 = 2.4
Number of households = 2.4 x 10^6
Therefore, the power station can serve approximately 2.4 x 10^6 households.
To find out how many households a power station can serve, we need to divide the total amount of energy generated by the power station (2.496 x 10^10 kWh) by the average electricity usage per household (1.04 x 10^4 kWh).
The formula to calculate the number of households is:
Number of households = Total energy generated / Average energy usage per household
To divide the numbers in scientific notation, we subtract the exponents:
Number of households = (2.496 x 10^10) / (1.04 x 10^4)
Dividing the coefficients, we get:
Number of households = 2.4 x (10^10 - 10^4)
To subtract the exponents, we subtract the smaller exponent (10^4) from the larger exponent (10^10), which gives us:
Number of households = 2.4 x 10^(10 - 4)
Simplifying the exponent, we get:
Number of households = 2.4 x 10^6
Therefore, a power station can serve approximately 2.4 x 10^6 households.
To find out how many households a power station can serve, we need to divide the total electricity generated by the station per year by the average electricity consumption of a household per year.
The total electricity generated by the station per year is 2.496 x 10^10 kWh.
The average electricity consumption of a household per year is 1.04 x 10^4 kWh.
To calculate the number of households the power station can serve, we divide the total electricity generated by the station by the average electricity consumption per household:
2.496 x 10^10 kWh / 1.04 x 10^4 kWh = (2.496 / 1.04) x (10^10 / 10^4) = 2.4 x 10^6.
Therefore, the power station can serve 2.4 x 10^6 households.