Khan/khan-exercises — Issue #4702: Significant figures 1 - Significant figures 1 - Faulty terminology (again)
Author: KhanBugz
Created: 2011-10-21 03:01:06+00:00
State: open
Labels: firefox, win7

Reporter: arthur@corlissfamily.org

I am reopening this since the previous report was closed with no explanation or comments. So, here we are again:

Your Significant Figures exercise claims that trailing zeroes in the decimal portion of a number are significant. Adding zeroes to a decimal adds precision, not significance, because the added zeroes have no quantitative impact on the value.

Adding trailing zeroes to the integral portion of a number does make them significant, since they impact the quantitative value of the number.

I have not watched your video, but this issue is more of an issue of linquistic accuracy.

[significant_figures_1.html?seed=5&problem=0](http://sandcastle.khanacademy.org/media/castles/Khan:master/exercises/significant_figures_1.html?seed=5&problem=0&debug)

["3","6"]

Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 6.1; rv:7.0.1) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/7.0.1

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