Question

An average American household uses about 1.04×10^4 kilowatt hours of electricity, a year. If a Power Station generates 2.496×10^10 Sheila hours per year how many households can it serve? Write your answer in scientific notation expressed to the exact decimal place.

Answer 1

To find the number of households that a Power Station can serve, we need to divide the total amount of electricity generated by the Power Station in a year by the amount of electricity used by an average American household in a year.

The amount of electricity generated by the Power Station is 2.496×10^10 kilowatt hours per year.
The amount of electricity used by an average American household is 1.04×10^4 kilowatt hours per year.

To find the number of households that can be served, we divide the total electricity generated by the electricity used by an average household:

Number of households = (2.496×10^10 kilowatt hours per year) / (1.04×10^4 kilowatt hours per year)

We can simplify this by dividing the numbers and subtracting the exponents:

Number of households = (2.496 / 1.04) × (10^10 / 10^4)

Number of households = 2.4 × 10^6

Therefore, the Power Station can serve 2.4 × 10^6 households.