Question

Find the difference: -2-6

Answer 1

The difference is -8. Why? Well, see below for the proper explanation!

I was taught how to solve these kinds of problems easily! Whenever you are subtracting a negative by a positive, you can think of it as using the two minus signs as addition and keeping the result negative. An example of this would be as follows:

Let’s take the problem -7 - 3.

See the two minus signs (the one in -7 and the one that shows we are subtracting)? Well, these two signs can be put together to form an addition sign (+), which shows that we are adding these two numbers together.

7 + 3 = 10

Now that we added the numbers, we can just add the negative sign back on to show that -7 - 3 = -10.

A simple way to remember this is that -7 + 3 would give us -4. This makes things easier to remember because subtraction is the inverse operation of addition, and since adding a negative and positive results in numbers that go more toward the origin and positive numbers side of a number line, we can just do the inverse operation to find that subtracting a negative by a positive number results in numbers moving to the left on a number line, which resembles less and farther from the origin.

Your final answer: -2 - 6 = -8. If you need extra help, let me know and I will gladly assist you.