In powers of ten, what does 'tera' represent?

In the metric system, the prefix 'tera' refers to a factor of (10^{12}). This means that 'tera' is used to denote one trillion in the short scale, which is commonly used in the United States and several other countries.

For example, if you have data storage measured in terabytes (TB), one terabyte represents (1,000,000,000,000) bytes, or (10^{12}) bytes. Understanding this prefix is essential in various scientific and mathematical contexts, especially when dealing with large quantities in fields such as computing, physics, and engineering where such magnitudes are frequent.

This establishes 'tera' as the equivalent to (+12) in powers of ten, making it the correct choice in this scenario.