1.5Measurement Uncertainty, Accuracy, and Precision
Section · module m68690Read §1.5 at OpenStax ↗
Study this section
Written from the section, each card quoting the span it came from. The ones you miss come back sooner.
What this needs
Learn these first — this section will not make sense without them.
Nothing in the algebra book is a prerequisite for this section.
What this touches
Algebra that turns up here. Not a blocker, but this is where you will see it used.
A trailing-zero number like 1,300 g is ambiguous between two and four significant figures, and the text resolves it only by rewriting in scientific notation — 1.3×10³ vs 1.300×10³ — so a student who cannot move between decimal and scientific form cannot use the convention the section depends on to remove the ambiguity.
A reported mass of 6.72 g with uncertainty ±0.01 g means the true value satisfies |measured − true| ≤ 0.01, i.e. the value lies in the interval [6.71, 6.73] — every uncertainty figure in this section is silently an absolute-value inequality defining an interval, even though the section never uses interval notation itself.