The first step is to understand what it means when a number has an exponent. The “power” of a number indicates how many times the base would be multiplied by itself to reach the correct value.
The second step is to write the number in the base-exponent form, and lastly calculate what the final result would be. Consider the example of 2 to the power of 4: in exponent form that would be
24
. To solve this, we need to multiply the base, 2 by itself, 4 times -
2⋅2⋅2⋅2
= 16. So
24=16
.
So re-applying these steps to our particular problem, we first convert our word problem to a base-exponent form of:
220
To simplify this, all that is needed is to multiply it out:
2 x 2 x 2 x 2 x ... (for a total of 20 times) = 1048576
Therefore, 2 to the power of 20 is 1048576.
