Question

Explain exponents with an example.

Answer 1

Let us take a number 256. You know when you do prime factorisation of this number, you get
$2\times 2\times 2\times 2\times 2\times 2\times 2\times 2,$ which is 2 multiplied itself 8 times.
Isn't this very laborious way of writing 256 ? and suppose you had to write a number such 13456890 in terms of its prime factors, you will have a long list of numbers getting multiplied by themselves.
Exponents help us in writing such numbers in a very convenient way. For example 256 can be written as $2^8$. 8 is exponent, which tells us that 2 is multiplied by itself 8 times.
There are various properties of exponents, like addition of exponents and subtraction of exponents etc.,