Place value
- CBSE · NCERT Class 7 Part 1, Ch 1 Large Numbers Around Us
Place value is the worth a digit gets from its position in a number, so the 5 in 520 stands for 500, not 5.
Our numbers use only ten digits, 0 to 9. The same digit means different things in different places. Each place is worth ten times the place to its right: ones, tens, hundreds, thousands, and so on.
Zero keeps the places in order. In 405, the 0 says there are no tens. Without it, 405 would read as 45.
A small example
Take the number 3,07,52,146, written with Indian commas. Read from the left:
- 3 crores and 0 ten lakhs.
- 7 lakhs.
- 5 ten thousands and 2 thousands.
- 1 hundred, 4 tens and 6 ones.
So it reads three crore, seven lakh, fifty-two thousand, one hundred and forty-six. The international system puts the commas elsewhere: 30,752,146. The number is the same. Only the grouping changes.
Why it matters later
A worked example in Class 10 Chapter 1 asks whether 4ⁿ can ever end in the digit 0. Ending in 0 means the ones digit is 0, so the number is a multiple of 10 = 2 × 5. The answer then turns to prime factorisation. 4ⁿ has only the prime 2, never 5, so it cannot end in 0.
Sources
Facts last checked against these sources on 30 September 2026.
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