What Is A Power? What Are Indices?

A power is another word for indices (what we looked at briefly during the BIDMAS section). Powers frequently pop up in mathematics, and to recognise them, it is usually a small number to the top right of another number or variable. Some examples of powers might look like this 2³, 5², x², y⁴.

What does a power actually mean though? Well we see the number in two parts, the big number and the little number. The little number is now many lots of the big number we need to multiply by. For example, 2³ = 2 x 2 x 2. So we multiple by 2, 3 times. We can actually work out the exact value of this which is 2³ = 8.

Let s look at another one, 3⁵ = 3 x 3 x 3 x 3 x 3 = 243. The bigger our power, the bigger our numbers get, and this can increase very quickly! But what happens if we have a variable as our big number ? Well let s take a look at x². This is like the others and just means x x. Usually we would just keep it in the form of x² though. You will see more on how x² is useful when learning about quadratic equations.