Hey you guys, when you're calculating and you know you're meant to have a final result to say, three sig figs, should you make every intermediate number that you might obtain in the progression of calculations you must go through in order to reach the final result to three sig figs, or should you carry everything over to the next calculation right until the end?
I'm totally unsure as to whether that makes sense or not.
I'll demonstrate...
So say you were calculating, idk...
Q=It.
And you had 23.0 seconds and 5.667 Amps, for our sake.
Your answer would be...130.341.
And you're going to go on to use Q in the next equation in order to find the number of mol of electrons for instance.
Would you round there, to 130 because you just did a calculation in which the value with the lowest number of sig figs had 3?
Or would you carry the whole 130.341 into the next equation and only round up/down at the end, when you give the final result? Because you could end up with a significantly different result depending on the values you use.
Argh, I hope it made sense that way. Thanks.