An online data storage facility has 1.326×1013

bytes of storage available. It has 2.6×104
customers. How many bytes of storage can each customer use? Write your answer in scientific notation, expressed to the exact decimal place

1 answer

To find out how many bytes of storage each customer can use, we need to divide the total storage by the number of customers:

\[ \text{Bytes per customer} = \frac{1.326 \times 10^{13} \text{ bytes}}{2.6 \times 10^{4} \text{ customers}} \]

First, we can perform the division of the coefficients:

\[ \frac{1.326}{2.6} \approx 0.510 \]

Now, we divide the powers of 10:

\[ \frac{10^{13}}{10^{4}} = 10^{13-4} = 10^{9} \]

Now, we multiply the coefficient by the power of ten:

\[ 0.510 \times 10^{9} \]

To express this in proper scientific notation, we need to adjust it to have one non-zero digit to the left of the decimal:

\[ 0.510 \times 10^{9} = 5.10 \times 10^{8} \]

Thus, the amount of storage available per customer is

\[ \boxed{5.10 \times 10^{8}} \text{ bytes} \]