Standard form is a way of writing numbers as the product of a number between 1 and 10 and a power of 10. It involves expressing very large or small numbers in a normalized way to show their order of magnitude. The document provides examples of numbers written in standard form, such as 1.44 × 1011 for 144,000,000,000. It also gives steps for converting numbers like 56,700,000 and 420000 into their standard form expressions of 5.67×107 and 4.2 x 105 respectively.