A student in the class has asked:
In working some practice problems, I became a little confused with the number of significant figures for numbers without decimals. The solutions in the book indicate the following for example: 358 (3 significant figures) ...should this be infinite significant figures? I thought that it would be three sig. figs. if this had a decimal place.
Answer:
This are only 3 sig figs in 358, and a decimal place would only be required to indicate as much if the number ended in a zero (like 350.) or multiple zeros (like 300.). absolute numbers, with infinite significance are rare. They include metric system conversion factors (as long as the conversion is simply one of magnitude, i.e. 1m = 1000 mm), stoichiometric numbers (we will see examples of this in chapter 3), formula numbers (the number 2 and 6 in the molecular formula C2H6), and perhaps others in other field of physical science.If you can think of any others, please suggest them.