Question Video: Arranging Multidigit Numbers in Ascending Order Mathematics

Video Transcript

Arrange the following in ascending order: 3838, 2865, 1139, and 5206.

When something ascends, it rises or goes up. And so, if we put a series of numbers in ascending order, we arrange the numbers so that they go up from least to greatest value. And that’s what we need to do with the four numbers we’ve been given here: 3838, 2865, 1139, and also 5206.

Now, often, when we compare numbers like this, we might write them in a place value grid and compare the digits from left to right in order of how large they are. But with these four numbers, we don’t have to do this. Why is this? Well, if we look quickly at the digit with the largest value in these numbers, which is the thousands digit, we can see that they’re all different. This means that we can put these numbers in order really quickly just by looking at this one digit. Which number has the least amount of thousands? It’s the third number in our list. It only has 1000. So, the smallest number, the one with the least value, is 1139.

Now that we’ve used this number, which of the remaining three numbers has the least amount of thousands now? It’s our second number. This only has two thousands. So, the second number in our list is going to be 2865. And by looking at our two remaining numbers, we can see that the first has three thousands and the second contains five. Three is obviously less than five. So, the next number in our list is 3838. And the greatest of our four numbers is the one that contains five thousands, 5206.

Each of the four-digit numbers that we looked at had a different number of thousands. As the thousands place in a number is the place with the greatest value, we could just look at the digit in this place and put the numbers in order straightaway. And so, our four numbers in ascending order — that’s from least two greatest value — are 1139, 2865, 3838, and 5206.