Question

Evaluate |5| – |-3|

Answer 1

Hint:

|5| – |-3|

is the same as

(5) – (3)

Answer 2

so 2?

Answer 3

yes

Answer 4

|x| means to make whatever is inside the bars positive (in other words, ignore the negative sign once you've evaluated what's inside). The easy case is |-x|, where the result is just x. Sometimes you can get tripped up though by something like |3 - 2|. If you look at this and don't think it through, you might be tempted to go with 3 + 2 or 5. But you have to do the math inside the bars first. So |3 - 2| is |1| or just 1.

Hope this helps.