Why am I having so much trouble doing Numbers in expanded form?

Hi Mel,

First of all, let me say that I want 1000 students like you.  You have the 100% right attitude!  It's not a race, you can take as much time as you like, the hints and videos are there to help you out, when you make a mistake, it's your opportunity to review those hints and better understand where you went wrong -- these are all things I repeat to my fifth- through eighth-graders over and over, but you understand it from the start!

We don't typically use this forum for help with individual problems, but I can't help myself.  :-)  The exercise is showing how whole numbers -- that is, regular counting numbers like 0, 1, 2, 3, on up to 104,805, and on and on -- can be written different ways. We express these numbers with our ten famous digits, and by putting them in different "place values", the different digits are worth different amounts -- so a 7 in the tens place is worth 70, but a 3 in the thousands place is worth 3,000. Anyone who's ever paid a mortgage bill understands this, but it's foreign to some early learners.

So the problem you've pasted here is to show what digits should go where if your number is 100,000 + 4,000 + 800 + 5.  As the hints show, that's going to be a 1 in the hundred-thousands place, a 4 in the thousands place, an 8 in the hundreds place and a 5 in the ones place -- that's the only possibility where they could go and still end up with our number. Note that there are no ten-thousands (well, actually, because our number includes 100,000, you could say that there are 10 groups of 10,000 -- but you can't fit "10" into a single place value, so we have to use a single hundred-thousand instead) and no tens, so we'll put zeros there.  So you just need to click on the box for each place value and type in the correct digit.

There are also none of the big numbers like millions, ten-millions, hundred-millions, billions, and so on -- so those are all zeros (but we don't write them down, because we wouldn't know where to stop!). There are also none of the decimal parts of a whole, like tenths, hundredths, or thousands, so those are all zeros that we *could* write down -- we could put a ".000" after the number if we wanted to -- but there's no need to do so.

And then writing the number in standard form is a piece of cake once you know what digits need to go where:  type 104,805 (with or without the comma) in the last box.

Good luck to you!