A proton has a size of 1.23x10^-11 and an electron has a size of 1.4x10^-8. How many times smaller is an electron than a proton? Show your work.
If I divided 1.23x10^-11 and 1.4x10^-8, wouldn't 1.4x10^-8 be the numerator or the denominator?
Please help!
something is really wrong with your data. you have the electron almost 1000 times larger than the proton.
how many times smaller is an electron?
ANS= diameter electron/diameter proton.
but your data is really wrong. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Orders_of_magnitude_%28length%29
It is just an example.
To determine how many times smaller one value is compared to another, you divide the two values. In this case, you want to find out how many times smaller an electron is compared to a proton.
To calculate this, you need to divide the size of the electron (1.4x10^-8) by the size of the proton (1.23x10^-11).
Let's perform the division:
(1.4x10^-8) / (1.23x10^-11)
When dividing numbers in scientific notation, you subtract the exponents and divide the coefficients.
So the division becomes:
1.4 / 1.23 = 1.138
10^-8 / 10^-11 = 10^(8-11) = 10^-3
Therefore, the division simplifies to:
1.138x10^-3
So, an electron is approximately 1.138x10^-3 times smaller than a proton.
Regarding your question about the numerator and denominator, in this case, 1.23x10^-11 is the denominator because we want to find the ratio of electron size to proton size, which requires dividing the electron size by the proton size.