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Rounding DP and Sig Fig

- When performing calculations, answers may need to be rounded to a specified number of decimal places or significant figures. - For decimal places, digits past the specified place are considered for rounding up or down. For significant figures, only non-zero digits are considered. - Examples of rounding to decimal places and significant figures are provided to illustrate the differences between the two methods.

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41 views1 page

Rounding DP and Sig Fig

- When performing calculations, answers may need to be rounded to a specified number of decimal places or significant figures. - For decimal places, digits past the specified place are considered for rounding up or down. For significant figures, only non-zero digits are considered. - Examples of rounding to decimal places and significant figures are provided to illustrate the differences between the two methods.

Uploaded by

45698722
Copyright
© © All Rights Reserved
We take content rights seriously. If you suspect this is your content, claim it here.
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Download as PDF, TXT or read online on Scribd
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Decimal Places and Significant Figures

When doing a caluclation, you may be asked to give your answer to a certain
number of decimal places or significant figures, rather than giving a precise
answer. To do this, you need to know how to round your answer.
Remember that you should always use several extra decimal places or sig-
nificant figures in your working than you need in your final answer, otherwise
there might be a rounding error in the final answer.

Decimal Places
If asked to give a number to n decimal places, we first look at the digit in the
(n + 1)th decimal place. We now have two options.

• If this (n + 1)th digit is 4 or lower then round down - leave the nth digit
as it is.

• If this (n + 1)th digit is 5 or higher then round up - add 1 to the nth digit.

For example, if we want to give the number 1.4836095 to 3 decimal places


then we consider the digit in the 4th decimal place, which is 6. As this is greater
than 5 we will round up, so we add 1 to the third digit and 1.4836095 is 1.484
to 3 decimal places. If we want to give 1.4836095 to 4 decimal places then we
consider the digit in the 5th decimal place. This is 0, so is less than 4 and so
we round down by leaving the 4th digit as it is. Thus 1.4836095 is 1.4836 to 4
decimal places.

Significant Figures
When rounding to a specified number of significant figures, the process is similar
to rounding to a number of decimal places. The difference is that any leading
zeros do not count as significant figures, so the first n significant figures are the
first n digits after the first non-zero digit.
For example, 0.010428 is 0.0104 to 4 decimal places, but is 0.01043 to 4
significant figures. Note that the 0 in the the third decimal place does count as
a significan figure, as it comes after a non-zero entry.
Note that zeros may also be necessary after the significant figures to ensure
that your answer has the correct magnitued. For example, 16849 is 16800 to 3
significant figures - the final two zeroes are not significant figures.

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