What are the orders of magnitude of the following?
“Orders of magnitude” is just another way of saying “powers of ten”. Scientists, engineers, policy makers, and many others will often use orders of magnitude as a way of describing how large quantities are. Frequently, orders of magnitude will also be used to represent differences in the sizes of two numbers. For example, China has about 1.3 billion people and Brazil has about 190 million, approximately a factor of 10 difference. We would say that China has an order of magnitude more people than Brazil. Note that we can make quantitative comparisons of size in this way without specifying exact numerical values. We calibrate orders of magnitude by saying the following: 0.1 – Negative 1 orders of magnitude 1 – 0 orders of magnitude 10 – 1 order of magnitude 100 – 2 orders of magnitude 1000 – 3 orders of magnitude If a value lies in between those numbers, then we usually associate its order of magnitude with its base power of ten. For example, 25 would be associated with 10 (1 order of ma
