A research study reports that an average person purchases 180 cans of beans per year. If there are 290 million people in the country, how many cans of beans are purchased by the whole country each year? Use scientific notation.
To calculate the total number of beans purchased by the entire country each year, we need to multiply the average number of cans purchased by each person by the total population of the country.
180 cans/person * 290,000,000 people = 54,000,000,000 cans
In scientific notation, this would be written as 5.4 x 10^10 cans.