When am I ever going to use negative exponents in real life?

2 answers

it depends on what you do but if you work in the stock market you'll need to use the to calculate losses compared to gains
I wish my stock market losses were negative exponents, as it is, most of them are positive exponents.

Positive exponents are large numbers;
10^2= 100
10^4=10,000

Negative exponents are quite the contrary;
10^-2= .02
10^-4=.0001

Negative exponents deal with small fractions of things

14grams= 1.4*10^-3 kilograms
the mass of an electron is
9.1*10^-31kg