What are Negative Exponents?
1 Answer
Negative exponents are an extension of the initial exponent concept.
To understand negative exponents ,
first review what we mean by positive (integer) exponents
What do we mean when we write something like:
One definition would be that
Note that using this definition
i.e.
Suppose you know the value of
but you would like to know the value of
For example suppose you knew that
Is there a faster way than multiplying
Yes.
If we note that
we can simply divide
In general if we know that the value of
and we want to know the value of
we can simply divide k by n^(p-q)
With this in mind what is the value of
We know that
so
That is
As a final example consider the descending powers of 3 in the following, noting that with each line down the result is decreased by dividing the current value by 3