Absolute value expressions for golf

Question

A certain company designs and ships boxes of golf balls each Box must weigh 540 grand write two absolute value expressions that represent the number of grams a Box weighing G grams is away from the desired weight

Answer 1

Here are the two tricks to this question: 1) an absolute value can be thought of as a distance from some central point (in this case, it's the "distance" away from the "perfect mass of 540g. Distances are always positive numbers, so absolute value is the perfect way to express them, as absolute values are also always positive 2) the distance between two points is always calculated by subtraction.

Imagine that Salem is at Milepost 50 on the Interstate and Eugene is at Milepost 110. How far apart are they. We could easily answer this by saying 110-50=60, so they are 60 miles apart. But nothing in the problem says which direction we are traveling, so we could also write 50-110 = -60. But distances can't be negative so...

|50-110| = 60.

Back to your problem: |G-540| or |540-G| tells us how "far" from the perfect mass G is. If the subtraction gives a negative, then the absolute value process would turn it to the required positive value. Plug in a reasonable value for G (such as 560 or 535) to check this out.

Best wishes!

Answer 2

|G - 540|

|540 - G|