If you have a basic scientific calculator (and if you don't you can buy one
for less than $50 almost anywhere, and you really ought to get one for this
class), you will have a button on it somewhere that looks like `` 
''.
That's the button to make a power of 10. You just enter a number, say 5, and
hit the `` '' button, and the number you get
back will be 
, or 100,000. In some cases, if you enter a big number,
such as 50, and hit the `` '' button, you won't see a 1 followed by 50
zeros
(you'd need a pretty big screen for that, or teeny tiny digits on the screen),
but some which looks like ``1 E 50'' or ``1 EE 50''. Don't panic -- that's
just you calculator's version of scientific notation, which we will talk
about in the next section.
Also on scientific calculators, you will find a button for doing logs -- it's
usually written ``log'', and is often very near the button for doing .
You just punch in a number, say 1,000,000, and hit the ``log'' button, and
you will get the log of a million, which is 6.