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Which number can you add to 14 to get a sum of 0?

User Vasant
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2 Answers

12 votes
12 votes

Answer:

The number is -14.

Explanation:

Up to now, you've been working with whole numbers. These are the positive numbers, those numbers you usually count with your fingers (1, 2, 3, ...), and 0. You've been working with these numbers ever since elementary school, where you would do computation with them, like adding, subtracting, and multiplying them. And, on a number line, they go from left to right, starting at 0.

But what happens when you go to the left on the number line? That is, what's before 0? We actually find negative numbers. The normal numbers that we usually work with, that being the positive numbers, now look like this:

(-1, -2, -3, ...)

A good thing to come from this is that now, we can define an additive inverse. An additive inverse is the negative, or opposite, of a whole number. The sum of a number and its additive inverse is 0.

So, for example, the additive inverse of 1 is -1, and 1 + (-1) = 0.

So clearly, we can see that the additive inverse of 14 is -14, since

14 + (-14) = 0.

(In case you wanted to know, the additive inverse of 0 is 0 because 0 is neither negative nor positive. So, 0 + 0 = 0.)

User Mughees
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3.3k points
12 votes
12 votes

Inverse operation

14 + (-14) =0

User Ruleant
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2.9k points