ShmoopTube
Where Monty Python meets your 10th grade teacher.
Search Thousands of Shmoop Videos
Absolute Value Problem 7697 Views
Share It!
Description:
We love doing absolute value problems because it means spending time with our good buddy, the number line. But don’t think we’ve forgotten about that twenty bucks he owes us. You hear that, Line? We’re coming for you.
Transcript
- 00:01
Absolute Value a la Shmoop A healthy sense of optimism can have a strong
- 00:05
effect on one’s psyche. No, no – psyche.
- 00:09
For example, you might hear an optimistic person say, “I just got a terrible haircut…
- 00:15
but my new faux-hawk will make me stand out from the crowd!”
- 00:18
Or, “an earthquake just swallowed my home… but I get to be on the news!”
Full Transcript
- 00:24
Or, “an asteroid the size of the sun is hurtling toward the Earth and we have only
- 00:28
a few minutes left to live… but at least we’re all going together!”
- 00:32
See how much nicer things seem when we put a positive spin on it?
- 00:35
Then you’re just going to love Absolute Value.
- 00:38
All this guy does is take negatives and turn them into positives. Of course, he also takes
- 00:42
positives and keeps them positive. We’re talking a whole lot of positivity.
- 00:47
Absolute Value determines how many spots away a number is from zero on the Number Line.
- 00:54
You could never be a negative number of spots away from zero, which is why Absolute Value
- 00:58
is always so dang positive. You can tell you’re dealing with an Absolute
- 01:01
Value because you’ll see a number surrounded by bars on either side. It looks almost like
- 01:06
they’re in prison or, as Absolute Value would say, “on vacation.”
- 01:10
Take any number, put it through the Absolute Value machine, and you’ll get its true colors.
- 01:15
Say you want to find the Absolute Value of the number seven.
- 01:18
First, we put it in “prison” so we know we’re looking for the Absolute Value, and
- 01:22
not just looking at a run-of-the-mill seven. Then we can count the spaces between zero
- 01:27
and seven… which, surprise surprise, is seven.
- 01:31
It will be the same story for every single positive number…
- 01:34
which makes our job easier. However, it’s a bit different when we have a negative number.
- 01:39
Suppose we want to find the Absolute Value of negative three. First we jail that sucker…
- 01:45
and then we locate it on the Number Line. We count three spaces in-between negative
- 01:48
three and zero, and so our Absolute Value is three.
- 01:54
But what if we have a number with more than one negative sign? Suppose it’s been hoarding
- 01:58
them since 1973 and has accumulated three hundred of them?
- 02:02
Doesn’t matter. No matter how many times you reflect the number three across zero…
- 02:07
It will always be exactly three spaces away from zero. Therefore, its Absolute Value will
- 02:12
always be three. Being so positive all the time can definitely
- 02:16
lift your mood, and keep you from being down in the dumps.
- 02:19
Absolute Value is about as upbeat as they come. Which can actually be really annoying
- 02:24
sometimes. If you tell anyone else we’ll deny it, but
- 02:28
boy, we hate that guy.
Related Videos
It's impressive that these expressions are able to stay so rational even when they're having operations performed on them.
Jack and Jill went up the hill to fetch a pail of water. But what happened when they got up there? They’ve been gone an awfully long time…
Sometimes, we just want fewer y's...or more x's. That's why it's great to know how to add and subtract variables. In real life, though, we try to a...