Question

Which of the following are like decimals?
458.22, 7.03093, 0.200037, 7.061

Answer 1

Hint: Find the number of decimal places in each of the numbers. Use the fact that in like decimals, the number of decimal places are equal. Hence convert these unlike decimal numbers into like decimal numbers by adding suitable numbers of 0s to the decimal numbers at the end.

Complete step-by-step answer:
Before solving the question, we need to understand what like decimals and unlike decimals are.
Decimals having the same number of decimal places are known as like decimals. In other words, decimals having the same number of digits to the right of the decimal point are said to like decimals.
Decimals which are not like are said to be unlike decimals. In other words, decimals having an unequal number of digits to the right of the decimal point are known as unlike decimals.
For number 458.22, number of digits to the right of the decimal point is 2
For number 7.0093, the number of the digits to the right of the decimal point is 5
For number 0.200037, the number of digits to the right of the decimal point is 6
For number 7.061, the number of digits to the right of the decimal point is 3
Hence, we conclude from the above definition that we need for every decimal number to have 6 digits to the right of the decimal point for these decimals to be like decimals.
Hence we add 4 zeros to the right of 458.22, 1 zero to the right of 7.0093 and 3 zeros to the right of 7.061
Hence the numbers become
458.220000, 7.030930, 0.200037, 7.061000

Note: Students often make a mistake in solving these types of questions by neglecting the last 0s, e.g. they write 15.80 as 15.8 and conclude that the number of decimal places of 15.80 is 1 which is incorrect. All the digits after the decimal place (including 0s) which are written have to be included in the count.