Video Transcript
Write eighty thousand nine hundred
twenty-seven in digits.
There are lots of ways to represent
numbers. And in this question, we’re given a
number that’s been written in words: eighty thousand nine hundred twenty-seven. And we’re asked to write this
number a different way, in digits. How many digits do you think we’ll
need? Or perhaps a better question is,
which part of our number should we look at to work out how many digits we’ll
need?
Just like any number, as we read it
in words, we can see that the place value units get less and less. So, for example, the last number we
say, which is the seven in 27, this actually has the smallest place value. This isn’t really a lot of help to
us to work out how many digits we’re going to need. But if we look at the other end of
our number, that’s the first part that we say, we can see a different story,
80,000. This is the part of the number with
the largest place value.
Now, because we can see the word
thousand, it might look like we’re talking about the thousands column here. Is this a four-digit number? Well, when we look how many
thousands we need, it’s 80,000. We’re going to need five digits to
show our number. Let’s draw a place value grid to
show this.
If our number was 8,927, then we’d
need to write the digit eight in the thousands place. Then it would be a four-digit
number we’d be talking about. But we need to show 80,000. And so the digit eight needs to go
in the ten thousands place. Eight lots of 10,000 are the same
as 80,000. And notice that our number doesn’t
say 81,000 or 85,000. It just says 80,000. So we need to put a zero in the
thousands place.
Now we’re just left with the
hundreds, tens, and ones, and we need to show 927. Well, we know how to do this, don’t
we? That’s a nine in the hundreds
place, a two in the tens place that represents 20, and a seven in the ones
place. And the only other thing that’s
useful to remember as we write our five-digit number is that it’s helpful to put a
comma after the thousands digit and before the hundreds digit. It’s just a way of separating out
the thousands, and it helps us to read the number quickly, 80,927.
We used a place value grid to show
that this number contains eight 10,000s, zero 1,000s, nine 100s, two 10s, and seven
ones. We can write the number using the
digits eight-zero-nine-two-seven.
