Hi, a few questions about significant figures requirements.
My teacher said that temperature should not be considered when determining the significant figures, essentially to assume that given temperatures are perfectly exact and implicitly have infinite significant figures. Can anybody confirm this?
Also, what are the significant figures guidelines for logarithms and exponents of base 10?
Thanks.
Hi,
I'm doing Year 11 WACE Chemistry, so it might be slightly different to the VCE requirements, but my teacher always says to use four decimal places in calculations and the final answer (if it, when put in scientific notation, is at least 10^3 or 10^-3) be to three significant figures in scientific notation.
Temperature seems to be to two decimal places, and our pH calculations are also two decimal places (assuming that's what you mean when asking about log calculations).
Yeah, so in general four decimal places for smaller numbers in calculations (for accuracy's sake), two for pH and temp, and three significant figures for exponents or numbers that can be turned into exponents to at least the positive or negative third power.