A water park has pools, slides, and rides that, in total, make use of 8.8 x 10^5 gallons of water. They plan to add a ride that would make use of an additional 51,000 gallons of water. Use scientific notation to express the total gallons of water made use of in the park after the new ride is installed.

1 answer

The water park currently uses \( 8.8 \times 10^5 \) gallons of water. They plan to add a ride that will use an additional \( 51,000 \) gallons of water.

First, we need to express \( 51,000 \) in scientific notation:

\[ 51,000 = 5.1 \times 10^4 \]

Now, we want to add \( 8.8 \times 10^5 \) and \( 5.1 \times 10^4 \). To do that, we need to express both numbers with the same exponent. We can express \( 5.1 \times 10^4 \) with \( 10^5 \) as the base:

\[ 5.1 \times 10^4 = 0.051 \times 10^5 \]

Now we can add:

\[ 8.8 \times 10^5 + 0.051 \times 10^5 = (8.8 + 0.051) \times 10^5 = 8.851 \times 10^5 \]

So the total amount of water used in the park after the new ride is installed is:

\[ \boxed{8.851 \times 10^5} \text{ gallons} \]