Week 3 – About Absolute values

This week, I’ve finally learned what this symbol means:

e.g. and

Well, at first it looks strange to me because they looked like 1’s or l’s, but it is actually something called “Absolute Values”. When you put a number into the said symbol or even an equation, the final product inside this “bracket” is always a positive number because it represents the value’s numerical distance (magnitude) to 0. 

Take another example:

In this example, the final sum was negative, but in this “bracket”, the answer turned into a positive, because what the equation’s finding was the sum’s distance to zero.