In a given year, about 1.52×1010

pieces of first-class mail are delivered in the U.S. If each piece of mail carries a stamp costing $0.55, what is the total cost in dollars to deliver all the pieces? Write the answer in scientific notation, expressed to the exact decimal place.(1 point
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1 answer

To find the total cost to deliver all the pieces of mail, you can multiply the number of pieces of mail by the cost of each stamp.

Given:

  • Number of pieces of mail: \( 1.52 \times 10^{10} \)
  • Cost of each stamp: \( 0.55 \)

Now, we can calculate the total cost:

\[ \text{Total Cost} = \text{Number of Pieces of Mail} \times \text{Cost per Stamp} \] \[ \text{Total Cost} = (1.52 \times 10^{10}) \times 0.55 \]

Calculating this step-by-step:

  1. Multiply the coefficient: \[ 1.52 \times 0.55 = 0.836 \]
  2. Since we're multiplying by \( 10^{10} \), we will keep the power of ten.
  3. Thus, we can express the total cost in scientific notation as: \[ 0.836 \times 10^{10} \]
  4. To convert \( 0.836 \) into proper scientific notation, we adjust it to \( 8.36 \) and decrease the exponent by 1: \[ 0.836 \times 10^{10} = 8.36 \times 10^{9} \]

Therefore, the total cost in dollars to deliver all the pieces of first-class mail, expressed in scientific notation, is:

\[ \boxed{8.36 \times 10^{9}} \]