[sdiy] DMM Question (Newbie Alert!)

[Sam Ecoff]

Hi All,

In order to reduce my newbie-ness and educate myself, I'm picking up  
some EE classes at the local tech college. It's fun and keeps me off  
the streets. While in lab measuring resistors today, a question  
occurred which the professor was unable to answer, so I'm asking here...

I get that a DMM provides different ranges settings for measuring  
various resistances with greater accuracy, and I understand that each  
range setting on the dial represents a different power of 10. What I  
don't understand is why the settings are marked 2M, 200k, 20k, 2k and  
200 rather than 1M, 100k, 10k, 1k, and 100. Can anybody help me figure  
this out?

Thanks,

Sam E.