explain the difference between (-3) and - 3
Answers
The two terms are equal, but they are not the same. 3 is a positive integer. It may help to think of it as having three dollars in your pocket. Your net worth is 3 dollars, yes?
Now we throw a minus sign in front of it: -3. That's negative three. Think of it as having a debt on your credit card of three dollars. Your net worth (ignoring the three dollars from the previous example) is actually a liability of three bucks. But here's the thing: your personal net worth is negative three dollars, but you do not owe your credit card company negative three dollars; you owe them three dollars.
That's where the vertical bars come in. We call that the absolute value operator, and it's behavior is to ignore the direction (positive or negative) of a value, and simply report the magnitude of it.
To summarize, 3 is just an unadorned value, while |-3| is a value with a contrary direction, which has been swept aside by the absolute value operator. The values of the two are identical; the paths to get there are markedly different.