Chemistry

Hello,

I believe that you are referring to significant figures. Basically the idea is that you cannot get more accuracy from a result than the least precise data measurement that you put in.

In other words.

If I tell you that I purchased 40 items. You cannot deduce that I actually bought 40.10 items.

However, if I give you a sequence of different measurements:


1.10, 1.15, 1.151, 1.13

Then if you add them, and divide them by four to give the average. You will get:


(1.10 + 1.15 + 1.151 + 1.13) / 4 = 1.13275.

However, your least accurate data only has 2 significant figures. So we cannot expect that our average will be any more accurate for example. So we will report our average to two significant figures.

We will report our average as 1.13.

I hope that this helps.