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Addition and subtraction with significant figures

This video teaches addition and subtraction with significant figures, emphasizing that the result should match the least precise measurement. It offers examples and explains the real-world importance of maintaining precision in calculations. Created by Sal Khan.

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  • winston default style avatar for user bigyellowlobster
    Wouldn't 3.56 be rounded to the nearest tenth be 3.6 and not 3.7? Is that a mistake?
    (58 votes)
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  • piceratops ultimate style avatar for user Rahat
    Shouldn't 103.56 be rounded to 103 and not 103.6 since 3 significant figures is less than four as Sal did?
    (18 votes)
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    • blobby green style avatar for user Chris.Turner.Mac
      No, because with addition (and subtraction) it isn't the significant figures that matter. In fact, this video isn't at all about significant figures. It's about decimal places (d.p). 1.26 went to 2 d.p. Whereas 102.3 only went to 1 d.p. As 1 d.p is less than 2 d.p. The answer can only go to 1 d.p.

      As you can see, significant figures don't come into it at all, and with the title, I can see why this would be confusing.
      (38 votes)
  • purple pi teal style avatar for user Nourjehan Faris
    Hi, i have a couple of questions for my physics course concerning Sig digits:
    1) what about when doing complicated math stuff, like squaring a number, or when adding two numbers and then taking the square root, or when using SIN COS or TAN, and so on. how many sig figs do we use then?
    (2 What if there are multiple steps in the math problem. what if i have to find the distance and time of a movement, and then using those values find the velocity. do i round the significant digits at the end or do i round each one.
    (6 votes)
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  • starky tree style avatar for user jdegrootlutzner
    In what order does one round?
    For example,
    (2.526/3.1)+(0.470/0.623)+(80.725/0.04326)= ?
    Would I add together each quotient and then round (128.1272741 ; what sig fig place would I round to?)
    , or would I round each quotient, add them together, and then round again (188.11)?
    Much thanks
    (4 votes)
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  • blobby green style avatar for user anamenotyetused
    Why not call the tower on the building 358 but put a line either above or below the 10's digit to show precision only to within 10 feet?
    (5 votes)
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  • leaf orange style avatar for user Lori Doran
    in the last example how was it that 350 had the least amount of significant figures compared to 8. 8 has less digits
    (3 votes)
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    • leaf grey style avatar for user Vyros
      350 has the same amount of significant digits as 8.8, actually. Did you mean 8.08?

      In significant digits you often have to figure out how many significant digits somebody else's number has. We have rules for doing this. If we didn't have rules, we wouldn't know anything. We wouldn't know whether 350 had an estimating digit of 5 or 0 or 3 or what. That's why we have significant digit rules that all people are supposed to follow. By these rules; the estimating digit of 350 is 5. So, it has two significant digits. 8.08 has an estimating digit of 8 (in the hundredth place), so it has three significant digits. Make sense?
      (2 votes)
  • male robot hal style avatar for user Nate
    why do they round up so much? can someone give me conditions for when that happens?
    (0 votes)
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  • leaf green style avatar for user sombrakev
    At around he says that 350ft is measured to the tenth feet, but I don't get it. There are 3 digits, so wouldn't that be a hundredth... or could someone tell me how this works?
    (1 vote)
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    • leaf green style avatar for user 福龍丸
      The answer:
      For this kind of problems, we are interested in the most accurate measurement to the right of the number. The more you go to the left, the less accurate your measurement will be. We don't focus on the measurement of the hundreds because this is the stuff we measured, in a way, before going on to measure the tens, which are more "tricky" since they require more precise instruments so as be measured.

      The background:
      If our number is a decimal, finding the least significant figure (useful to solve the problem) is perhaps more obvious because it's all written down, complete with trailing 0's (that are different from those you would find in the purely mathematical videos that precede this one, in that they actually inform us that the measurement was made precisely up to a certain digit).
      If we're dealing with a whole number without a decimal point and without a line above or below a digit, we tend to assume that any 0's present to the right of the number are the product of rounding or insufficient accuracy, and thus not count them as significant. In 350, three hundreds and five tens are significant, but the most fine measurement is the five tens. We don't have sufficient data about the ones' place! It could theoretically be anything from 0 to 9, although if it's greater than five we would have probably measured it as 360 in the first place (except if the 5 in the tens' place becomes a 4 and we round up) .

      If you're still confused, please contact.
      (4 votes)
  • cacteye green style avatar for user Mia
    So, I do a science competition every year with a group at my school and this year I was put into an event that is purely math, I am normally good at math but I am failing to understand the concepts, I have to learn sig figs, gas laws, area density, number density, and some other stuff. We don't have any teachers or coaches, and I live in a very rural area so I pretty much teach myself through the internet and books, khan academy has helped out a lot but I still am just overwhelmed by it all, we compete against charter school and homeschool teams and even though we have a very low budget we have come in second or third place every year, we have made it to states before and I really want to make it again this year, I don't want to let my team down and I honestly just want to understand the concepts even if we don't make it to states. I know this doesn't exactly apply to this video but my question is if anyone has any advise on how to understand a math concept easier, any websites I should use, and how to cram and memorize in little time.
    (3 votes)
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  • blobby green style avatar for user MANDEEP SHARMA
    lets take an addition of significant figures : say: 3.5+2.25
    here why dont we write a zero after 3.5 like 3.50 so that both the numbers being added have 3 significant figures.
    (2 votes)
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    • blobby green style avatar for user LAINEJOR000
      Adding a zero at the end of 3.5 implies that we were able to measure something to a precision of three decimal places. However, this is inaccurate. Because the significant figure rules are in place for when we measure something and want to combine two different measurements, the significant figure rules are in place to keep the precision of our measurements in mind in our final answer.
      (1 vote)

Video transcript

We saw in the last video that when you multiply or you divide numbers, or (I guess I should say when you multiply or divide measurements) your result can only have as many significant digits as the thing with the smallest significant digits you ended up multiplying and dividing. So just as a quick example, if I have 2.00 times (I don't know) 3.5 my answer over here can only have 2 significant digits This has 2 significant digits, this has 3. 2 times 3.5 is 7, and we can get to 1 zero to the right of the decimal. Because we can have 2 significant digits. This was 3, this is 2. We only limited it to 2, because that was the smallest number of significant digits we had in all of the things that we were taking the product of. When we do addition and subtraction, it's a little bit different. And I'll do an example first. I just do a kind of a numerical example first, and then I'll think of a little bit more of a real world example. And obviously even my real world examples aren't really real world. In my last video, I talked about laying down carpet and someone rightfully pointed out,"Hey, if you are laying down carpet, you always want to round up. Just because you don't wanna it's easier to cut carpet away, then somehow glue carpet there. But that's particular to carpet. I was just saying a general way to think about precision in significant figures. That was only particular to carpets or tiles. But when you add, when you add, or subtract, now these significant digits or these significant figures don't matter as much as the actual precision of the things that you are adding. How many decimal places do you go? For example, if I were to add 1.26, and I were to add it to - let's say - to 2.3. If you just add these two numbers up, and let's say these are measurements, so when you make it (these are clearly 3 significant digits) we're able to measure to the nearest hundreth. Here this is two significant digits so three significant digits this is two significant digits, we are able to measure to the nearest tenth. Let me label this. This is the hundredth and this is the tenth. When you add or subtract numbers, your answer, so if you just do this, if we just add these two numbers, I get - what? - 3.56. The sum, or the difference whatever you take, you don't count significant figures You don't say,"Hey, this can only have two significant figures." What you can say is, "This can only be as precise as the least precise thing that I had over here. The least precise thing I had over here is 2.3. It only went to the tenths place, so in our answer we can only go to the tenths place. So we need to round this guy up. Cause we have a six right here, so we round up so if you care about significant figures, this is going to become a 3.7. And I want to be clear. This time it worked out, cause this also has 2 significant figures, this also has two significant figures. But this could have been... (let me do another situation) you could have 1.26 plus 102.3, and you would get obviously 103.56. Then, in this situation - this obviously over here has 4 significant figures, this over here has 3 significant figures. But in our answer we don't want to have 3 significant figures. We wanna have the... only as precise as the least precise thing that we added up. The least precise thing we only go one digit behind the decimal over here, so we can only go to the tenth, only one digit over the decimal there. So once again, we round it up to 103.6. And to see why that makes sense, let's do a little bit of an example here with actually measuring something. So let's say we have a block here, let's say that I have a block, we draw that block a little bit neater, and let's say we have a pretty good meter stick, and we're able to measure to the nearest centimeter, we get, it is 2.09 meters. Let's say we have another block, and this is the other block right over there. We have a, let's say we have an even more precise meter stick, which can measure to the nearest millimeter. And we get this to be 1.901 meters. So measuring to the nearest millimeter. And let's say those measurements were done a long time ago, and we don't have access to measure them any more, but someone says 'How tall is it if I were stack the blue block on the top of the red block - or the orange block, or whatever that color that is?" So how high would this height be? Well, if you didn't care about significant figures or precision, you would just add them up. You'd add the 1.901 plus the 2.09. So let me add those up: so if you take 1.901 and add that to 2.09, you get 1 plus nothing is 1, 0 plus 9 is 9, 9 plus 0 is 9, you get the decimal point, 1 plus 2 is 3. So you get 3.991. And the problem with this, the reason why this is a little bit... it's kind of misrepresenting how precise you measurement is. You don't know, if I told you that the tower is 3.991 meters tall, I'm implying that I somehow was able to measure the entire tower to the nearest millimeter. The reality is that I was only be able to measure the part of the tower to the millimeter. This part of the tower I was able to measure to the nearest centimeter. So to make it clear the our measurement is only good to the nearest centimeter, because there is more error here, then... it might overwhelm or whatever the precision we had on the millimeters there. To make that clear, we have to make this only as precise as the least precise thing that we are adding up. So over here, the least precise thing was, we went to the hundredths, so over here we have to round to the hundredths. So, since 1 is less then 5, we are going to round down, and so we can only legitimately say, if we want to represent what we did properly that the tower is 3.99 meters. And I also want to make it clear that this doesn't just apply to when there is a decimal point. If I were tell you that... Let's say that I were to measure... I want to measure a building. I was only able to measure the building to the nearest 10 feet. So I tell you that that building is 350 feet tall. So this is the building. This is a building. And let's say there is a manufacturer of radio antennas, so... or radio towers. And the manufacturers has measured their tower to the nearest foot. And they say, their tower is 8 feet tall. So notice: here they measure to the nearest 10 feet, here they measure to the nearest foot. And actually to make it clear, because once again, as I said, this is ambiguous, it's not 100% clear how many significant figures there are. Maybe it was exactly 350 feet or maybe they just rounded it to the nearest 10 feet. So a better way to represent this, they... would be to say instead of writing it 350, a better way to write it would be 3.5 times 10 to the second feet tall. And when you are writing in scientific notation, that makes it very clear that there is only 2 significant digits here, you are only measuring to the nearest 10 feet. Other way to represent it: you could write 350 this notation has done less, but sometimes the last significant digit has a line on the top of it, or the last significant digit has a line below it. Either of those are ways to specify it, this is probably the least ambiguous, but assuming that they only make measure to the nearest 10 feet, If someone were ask you: "How tall is the building plus the tower?" Well, your first reaction were, let's just add the 350 plus 8, you get 358. You'd get 358 feet. So this is the building plus the tower. 358 feet. For once again, we are misrepresenting it. We are making it look like we were able to measure the combination to the nearest foot. But we were able to measure only the tower to the nearest foot. So in order to represent our measurement at the level of precision at we really did, we really have to round this to the nearest 10 feet. Because that was our least precise measurement. So we would really have to round this up to, 8 is greater-than-or-equal to 5, so we round this up to 360 feet. So once again, whatever is... Just to make it clear, even this ambiguous, maybe we put a line over to show, that is our level of precision, that we have 2 significant digits. Or we could write this as 3.6 times 10 to the second. Which is times 100. 3.6 times 10 to the second feet in scientific notation. And this makes it very clear that we only have 2 significant digits here.