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Thursday, June 2, 2016

Decimal Number System (Base 10)

In the decimal system the successive positions to the left of the decimal point represent units, tens, hundreds, thousands etc. For example if we consider the number 7762, the digit 2 represents the number of units, 6 represents the number of tens, 7 the number of hundreds and 7 the number of thousands.

(7 x 1000) + (7 x 100) + (6 x 10) + (2 x 1) = 7762

Thus as we move one position to the left, the value of the digit increases by ten times. We can see that the position of the number affects its value. These kind of number systems are therefore called positional number systems. In other words the number of symbols used to represent numbers in the system is called the base of that system. In short we can say that the value of each digit in the number system is determined by :
- The digit itself
- The position of the digit in the number itself
- The base of the system.

The Roman numbering system uses symbols like I, II, III, IV, V etc. to represent the decimal numbers 1, 2, 3, 4, 5. As we can see this follows an additive approach and hence is not conductive to arithmetic. 

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