Group Work 2: Scientific Notation 1. At the end of September, 2015, the New Horizons spacecraft (which encountered Pluto for the first time in July 2015) was 4.898 billion km from Earth. Convert this number to scientific notation. How many astronomical units is this? (An astronomical unit is the distance from Earth to the Sun, or about 150 million km.) 2. During the first six years of its operation, the Hubble Space Telescope circled Earth 37,000 times, for a total of 1,280,000,000 km. Use scientific notation to find the number of km in one orbit. 3. In a large university cafeteria, a soybean-vegetable burger is offered as an alternative to regular hamburgers. If 889,875 burgers were eaten during the course of a school year, and 997 of them were veggie-burgers, what fraction and what percent of the burgers does this represent? 4. In a 2012 Kelton Research poll, 36 percent of adult Americans thought that alien beings have actually landed on Earth. The number of adults in the United States in 2012 was about 222,000,000. Use scientific notation to determine how many adults believe aliens have visited Earth. 5. In the school year 2009
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2010, American colleges and universities awarded 2,354,678 degrees. Among these were 48,069 PhD degrees. What fraction of the degrees were PhDs? Express this number as a percent. 6. A star 60 light-years away has been found to have a large planet orbiting it. Your uncle wants to know the distance to this planet in old-fashioned miles. Assume light travels 186,000 miles per second, and there are 60 seconds in a minute, 60 minutes in an hour, 24 hours in a day, and 365 days in a year. How many miles away is that star?
