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Scientists have come up with a handy notation that helps take care of variables that have very large or very small values in their standard units. Say you’re measuring the thickness of a human hair and find it to be 0.00002 meters thick. You could use scientific notation to write this as meters ( meters), or you could use the unit prefix , which stands for micro: . When you put in front of any unit, it represents 10^–6 times that unit.

A more familiar unit prefix is k, as in kilo, which represents 10³ times the unit. For example, the kilometer, km, is 10³ meters, which equals 1,000 meters. The following table shows other common unit prefixes that you may see.