How Place Tells a Digit's Value

Hi there! I'm Lumi, and today we're going to discover something amazing about numbers. Imagine you work at an apple market. You sell apples one at a time, in bags of 10, in boxes of 100, and in big crates of 1,000. Notice something? Each group has ten times as many apples as the one before it! Numbers work the same way. Every number is made of digits — like 0, 1, 2, 3, and so on. But a digit's VALUE depends on WHERE it sits in the number. That place is called its **place value**. Look at the number 3,333. Every digit is a 3 — but they don't all mean the same thing! - The 3 on the far right sits in the **ones** place. It means 3 apples. - The next 3 sits in the **tens** place. It means 30 apples — that's ten times as many! - The next 3 sits in the **hundreds** place. It means 300 apples — ten times as many as the tens! - The 3 on the far left sits in the **thousands** place. It means 3,000 apples — ten times as many as the hundreds! Here is the big idea: **each place to the LEFT is worth ten times as much as the place to its right**. So 1 ten = 10 ones. 1 hundred = 10 tens. 1 thousand = 10 hundreds. Hint: If you ever get confused, draw a small place-value chart with four columns — Thousands | Hundreds | Tens | Ones — and write each digit in its column. Then multiply by 10 as you move left!