Rounding whole numbers to nearest thousand

0:00Round 423,275 to the nearest thousand. So let me rewrite it: 423,275. And so the thousands place is the 3 right here, and so if we were round it up to the nearest thousand, we would go to 420-- let me write it so we just focus on the 3-- we would go up to 424,000 if we wanted to round up, 424,000, and if we wanted to round down, we would go to 423,000.

0:46We would get rid of the 275. 423,000. So this is our choice. Round up to 424,000 or round down to 423,000. And to figure it out, we just look at the digit one place to the right of the 3, so we look at the 2 right there. If that digit is 5 or greater, you round up.

1:11So this is 5. So if this is greater than or equal to 5, 5 or greater, you round up. If it's less than 5, you round down. 2 is definitely less than 5, so we just round down, so it is 423,000. Now just to visualize what this means to the nearest thousand, if I were to do a number line-- and you don't have to do this.

1:36We've gotten the answer, but just to have a little bit better visualization of it, if I were to increment by thousands, you might have 422,000, 423,000. You have 424,000, and then maybe over here, you have 425,000, and you could keep going. Now 423,275 is going to be someplace right around here.

2:10And so when we round to the nearest thousand, we have to pick between that and that. We see that it much closer to 423,000 than to 424,000, so we round it right there. But you just use the rules we just came up with, and we rounded down to 423,000.