I found this question very interesting because this was the first time I came across scientific notation! Scientific notation is where there is only one number before the decimal point. So in order to make 27.1 x 10^4 into scientific notation I had to move the decimal one place to the left. When you move a decimal one place to the left you are in fact adding a positive exponent to the 10^4 (If you were moving it to the right then you’d be adding a negative exponent). Which means that 10^4 is now 10^5. So now we have the number 2.71 x 10^5 (scientific notation form). Though we are not done yet, we need to figure out the value of a + n (a x 10^n). Meaning that we need to addition 2.71 (a) and 5 (n), which gives us 7.71!