Find each sum or difference. -6 - 5

Question

Accepted Answer

Hello. Everyone in this video we're going to be looking at this practice problem where we want to perform the subtraction negative 7 -3. So in order to help me visualize this I'm going to draw a number line And I'll go ahead and label this first line negative seven and then I'll just add a few more ticks. So I'll label negative seven negative six negative eight negative nine negative 10, negative 11, negative 12 and negative 13. So notice how as I go to the left of the number line, the numbers are increasing because I'm dealing with negative numbers. So the farther I go from zero which is over here on the right the greater the magnitude of the numbers are so it's the reverse of positive numbers. So in this case I have negative seven. So I'm just going to draw a dot at negative seven -3 which means I need to go to the left three spaces And if I do that 123 I land a negative 10. So my final answer would be negative 10. You can also think of this as - -3. And because both of these are negative, I know that my final answer is going to be negative. But because I'm subtracting from an already negative number, I know that in reality this becomes a sort of addition because I need to add both of those magnitudes together and when I do this seven plus three is equal to 10 and once again I get negative 10. So both ways you can see that our final answer becomes negative and that aligns with answer choice C. So hopefully this video helped and see you next time.

Struggling with College Algebra?

Find each sum or difference. -6 - 5

Watch next

Exponents practice set