Aday has 86,400 second (s). notice that the decimal point is to the far right of the number. the first part of scientific notation is a number between 1 and 10. move the decimal point to the left to obtain 8.64, which equals m in our traditional notation. the value for n is given by the number of places the decimal point was moved from its location in 86,400 to 8.64. thus, 86,400 s = 8.64×104 s. because the decimal was moved four places to the left (and the value is larger than 1), the exponent is a positive integer. if you had a very precise clock, you could write this as 8.640×104 s, or 8.6400×104 s. the number of digits you keep in the first part of the notation describes the precision of your value and determines the number of significant digits.