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The answer is that the exponent here should be a times b or just ab. This
expression over here says multiply x to the a times itself b number of times,
but we also know that x to the power of a tells us to take x, and multiply it by
itself a number of times. If we wrote each of these factors of x to the a as a
bunch of x's multiplied together, we would just get a giant string of x's all
multiplied together. Since we're taking b groups of a things multiplied
together, the total number of x's we have is a times b.