MA, Stanford University
Teaching in the San Francisco Bay Area
Alissa is currently a teacher in the San Francisco Bay Area and Brightstorm users love her clear, concise explanations of tough concepts
In this problem it's kind of like doing what you've learnt for absolute value inequality graphs but backwards. In this situation they gave you the graph and they are asking you to write the inequality. So before you can come up with the answer, this one involves a lot of thinking and not as much writing.
Think about this, we want numbers that are about 3 away from 0 absolute value means distance from 0. They could be 3 in this direction or they could be three in that direction so the way you write that is that the absolute value of whatever number we are working with needs to be less than or equal to 3.
It can be 3 away in this direction or 3 away in that direction or it could be two and a half away or one it could be any distance we want to as long as that distance is less than or equal to 3. And I knew it could be equal to because of those closed circles.
So again this is kind of a tricky problem that doesn't involve a lot of writing but it does involve some clever thinking. You're looking for numbers that are less than a distance of 3 away from 0. That's what this statement means.
