ShmoopTube

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And here's your shmoop du jour.

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Of all the absolute values of the following numbers, which would be the greatest?

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Here are the potential answers...

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Before we spoil the ending and kill all the drama... why not hit pause and try to solve this one yourself first?

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OK, this question is just testing whether

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we can use a number line and do some simple conversions...

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...er, these conversions...

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...and that we know what absolute value means.

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To refresh our memories... absolute value is just the quantity of units of any number

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from 0 on the number line.

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Doesn't matter whether we're going in a positive or negative direction -- it's

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only about how far we travel. So let's start by just converting these

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numbers into decimals, so they'll fit.

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Look through the potential answers.

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A is -1 tenth, or -.1, and it goes here on the line.

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But since it's only the absolute value we care about, we'll put it on the positive side.

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B is negative .05, but on the positive side of the line it goes here --

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and is clearly less than .1.

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C is .02 and goes here and yeah, if you haven't figured it out by now, we can ignore the minus signs.

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And finally we have D at .01 and it goes here.

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So the answer is A.

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Point one is furthest away from the origin and has the biggest absolute value.

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