Do you know what Place Value is? What if I give you 10 apples and your brother took 2 apples from you. Do you know the place value of the number ‘10’is? Well, 0 is at one place and 1 is at the tens place. How did I know that? Voila! Here are the magic lies.
Math provides us with a lot of interesting concepts and one of them is called place value. Do you know what this is all about? Let’s read an example about the number system and understand how it works.
A Story about the Number System
In Mexico, the number system that works here is by counting the number of fingers in hands and feet, which is 20. Anything that comes after 20 is the new human.
Therefore, 21 is the first human and the first finger of the second human. Similarly, 42 is the second finger of the third human.
However, this one human and another human to bring 21 and 42, and so on creates a lot of maddening issues. For this, a single numbering system was brought into the world. Here, the number system has a base of 10 to get a number greater than 9.
All we need to do is put numbers together, rather than using toes/fingers/eyes.
Here, the number is written as “ab”. Here, “b” is at the unit’s place or at one’s position, while “a ” is at the tenth’s place.
So, we say that “a” is at tens place, we write it as “a * 10” or “10a”. Similarly, “b *1“ or ”b “, so we get a new form as 10 a + b.
Now, let us gain insight into the Indian and International Systems of Numeration.
Indian and International System of Numeration
In the above text, we have gone through an example of two-digit numbers, however, there are large numbers that we need to have an understanding of.
For instance, 143285 is made of six digits, i.e., 1, 4, 3, 2, 8, and 5. Let us draw a place value chart for this large number.
| L | Tth | Th | H | T | U |
| 1 | 4 | 3 | 2 | 8 | 5 |
| 1 * 1,00,000 | 4 * 10, 000 | 3 * 1,000 | 2 * 100 | 8 * 10 | 5 * 1 |
Here, let us see how this big number is formed:
1,00,000
40,000
3,000
200
80
+ 5
1,43,285
Now, let us look at a story of Sneha as a reference to perform an operation on Place Value:
Story of My Best Friend Sneha
One day, my best friend Sneha was called to prepare a guest list for an award ceremony. 55 guests came to the ceremony, out of these only 23 remained till the end of the function, so how many guests were left in the middle of the function? Well, for that we need to understand one of the very interesting concepts called “Place Value.”
The Place Value Concept:
Here, the sequence of placing each digit in numbers 55 and 23 is as follows:
| Tens | Ones |
| 5 | 5 |
| Tens | Ones |
| 2 | 3 |
Here, Ones means 5 * 1 and 5 tens means 5 * 10 = 50
So, 50 + 5, we get 55.
Similarly, 3 Ones means 3 * 1 = 3 and 2 tens means 2 * 10 = 20, we get 20 + 3 = 23.
Now, let us how the subtraction is performed for the guests who didn’t turn up to the ceremony:
| Guests invited | Attended the ceremony | Didn’t Attend
(subtraction) |
| 55 | 23 | 55 – 23 = 32 |
The simple way is, to subtract 2 tens from 5 tens, we get 3 tens and then 3 ones from 5 ones, we get 2 ones. After we have got the result, we write as per the place value, which is as follows:
| Tens | Ones | Deciding the place value | Numer obtained |
| 3 | 2 | 3 * 10 + 2 * 1 | 32 |
So, this was all about the Place Value in the Indian and International Numeral System and how we can perform any type of operation on the same. Going through this concept will help you solve a variety of problems in the advanced topics smoothly.
