Tyler Heppner, Wei-Jie Gan, David Tse, Peter Tang 2-3 7.

1 Problems and Errors May 15 2012

7.1 is a very simple section to understand, as we get a brief introduction to what absolute values are and how to solve absolute values. However, there are a few small errors that can be made, and therefore, can ruin your answer by small and simple means. First, we know that absolute values are values that are from zero, and therefore, are all positive or zero. We need to make sure that we know that whatever a solution is inside of the absolute value brackets, whether the solution is positive, zero, or negative, will always factor out to be positive. This is where things can get tricky. If you have a value that is inside of the absolute value symbols and there is a negative sign outside of the absolute value brackets, the solution will be negative at the end because we are multiplying a positive and a negative, not a negative and a negative. Many of the questions that are provided in this section either follow BEDMAS or are word problems and so we will touch a little bit on both. Some questions in this section involve more than one absolute value and may require squaring and multiplication etc. We need to make sure that we are following the rule of BEDMAS (Brackets, Exponents, Division, Multiplication, Addition, and Subtraction), knowing that all values inside of the absolute value symbols will turn out to be positive, and that negatives outside of the absolute value symbols will make the absolute value expression negative. We also learn how to put real numbers that may include absolute values into order. As always, remind yourself to look at the question and does it ask to go in order from least to greatest or greatest to least? Another key for ordering numbers is to put all of the numbers into decimal form. As well, what also helps is to arrange the decimal numbers in order first, and then to arrange the actual numbers in order according to the order of the decimal numbers. The final thing that may be a bit confusing in this section is the word problems. Quite often, people dont know that with the absolute values in play here, there are actually two ways to write the question and both ways come up with the exact same solution. The word problems in this section almost all deal with a range of some sort and so this range is positive. The first way to write the question is by putting two positive values into the absolute value symbols because once you add these two values together; they will equal a positive value and a positive value inside of the absolute

value symbols results in a positive number outside of the absolute value symbols. The second way to write the equation is by putting two negative values into the absolute value symbols because once you subtract these two values together, they will equal the same value as the value in the first method of solving, except this time, the value is negative. However, it all works out because a negative value inside of the absolute value symbols is a positive value outside of the absolute value symbols. Just to conclude, you cannot have a positive value and a negative value inside of the absolute value symbols because the result that you will get from combining the negative value and the positive value is not the same as the large negative value or the large positive value. Sounds good, yes!