Video Transcript
The negative of the absolute value of negative 64 is equal to blank.
We recall that the absolute value of any number is the distance of that number from zero. This means that the directional sign doesn’t matter and the absolute value of a number is never negative. The absolute value of negative 64 is therefore equal to 64, as negative 64 is 64 away from zero. We don’t just want the absolute value of negative 64 though. We want the negative of this answer. This means that the negative of the absolute value of negative 64 is actually equal to negative 64.
A common mistake here would be to think that the two negative signs become a positive, as usually when we are subtracting a negative number, we get a positive answer. This is not the case in this question though as we must find the absolute value of negative 64 first. This links us back to our order of operations known as PEMDAS or BIDMAS, where we do the brackets or parentheses first. In this case, we must work out the absolute value first.
