Question 514146
Scientific notation is used primarily in *science* for expressing certain quantities such as the mass of a particle or the amount of force exerted. This is different from engineering notation (similar to scientific notation, except the exponents are multiples of 3 to allow for common SI prefixes). For example, 4.7 * 10^4 would be written as 47 * 10^3 in engineering notation.


The national debt is rarely, if at all, expressed in scientific notation because most everyone knows what 14 trillion dollars is. If the debt were somehow 14 quadrillion dollars we would either use scientific notation or say "14,000 trillion."