SAT Tip: Calculating Absolute Values
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This tip on improving your SAT score was provided by Vivian Kerr at Veritas Prep.
The simplest way to think of absolute value is as the distance from a number to zero on a number line. Just like shapes such as squares and triangles can’t have side values that are negative (because that wouldn’t make sense in the real world), absolute values will always be positive. We can’t have a “negative” distance. That’s why |-3| = 3, and why also |3| = 3. Both -3 and 3 are (in the real world) three spaces away from zero on a number line. Absolute value equations will almost always yield two possible solutions.