While subtracting a positive and a negative number, we take the sum of the absolute values of both the numbers and attach the sign of the minuend with the answer. Subtraction of a positive number and a negative number While subtracting two positive numbers we simply take the difference of absolute values of both the numbers and attach a sign of the greater number with the answer. Let's learn the rules of subtraction also to ease out our calculations while dealing with operations on integers. This is one way of solving subtraction questions. While writing any subtraction problem also, we have to take the sign of subtrahend inside the bracket and add the addition operator between both the terms. So, every subtraction problem can be written as an addition problem. You must have studied that addition and subtraction are inverse operations. In the image below, observe all three addition rules for integers on the number line. While adding two negative numbers, we take the sum of both the numbers and attach a negative sign with the answer. While adding a positive and a negative number, we take the difference of the absolute values of both the numbers and attach the sign of the greater number with the answer. While adding two positive numbers we simply add both the numbers and get an answer which is a positive value, just like the addition of whole numbers.Īddition of a positive number and a negative number
We usually don’t say “positive” or write the + sign so you will not see two plus signs together very often. This can be confusing but the rules below can help: When we do operations (like adding and subtracting) with integers we often end up with two signs next to each other.