In the first line, 1.0 cm/20 s was multiplied by the ratio of 1 in to 2.54 cm (which is equal to one).

By
strategically putting the unit of cm in the enominator, we are able to remove this unit and retain inches.
However, based on the calculator, the conversion involves several digits.

In the second line, we divided 1.0 by 20 and retained two digits and rewrote in terms of a factor 10 - 2.
The final answer is then rounded off to

retain two figures.

In performing the conversion, we did two things. We identified the number of significant figures and
then rounded off the final answer to retain

this number of figures. For convenience, the final answer is rewritten in scientific notation.

*The number of significant figures refers to all digits to the left of the decimal point (except zeroes after
the last non-zero digit) and all digits to

the right of the decimal point (including all zeroes).

*Scientific notation is also called the “powers-of-ten notation”. This allows one to write only the
significant figures multiplied to 10 with the

appropriate power. As a shorthand notation, we therefore use only one digit before the decimal point
with the rest of the significant figures

written after the decimal point.