At the end of fiscal year 2004, the federal debt of Country C is $278,560,125,000. What is the closest estimation of this amount? Express your answer in the form of a single digit times an integer power of 10. (1 point)

Question

2.79×10
11


3×10
11


3×10
−11


2×10
11

Answer 1

To estimate the federal debt of Country C, we can express the amount in scientific notation:

The given amount is \( 278,560,125,000 \).

We can simplify this to \( 2.78560125 \times 10^{11} \).

For estimation purposes, we typically round to one significant figure. Therefore, we approximate it to \( 3 \times 10^{11} \).

So the closest estimation of the federal debt in the required form is:

3 × 10²¹.