Question

Identify the solution set of |x + 3| + 7 10 and describe the graph in a complete sentence.

Answer 1

When you have an absolute value, that just means that whatever answer you get, make it positive. So all positive and negative numbers will be just positive if they're in there. For example, |-3|=3 and |3|=3. So you can see that if you have an unknown, it could be positive or negative, if you're getting rid of the absolute value signs.

If you have |x|=2 how do you know that x is -2 or +2? You don't, so what you do is say that \[x= \pm 2\] which is just a positive sign on top of a negative sign. You can use the same thing for square roots of positive numbers since you can multiply 5*5 or -5*-5 to get 25 for example.