If Mary lives 3 blocks east of the grocery store, we can plot her house 3 units to the right of the grocery store, so the coordinates of Mary's houseare (3, 0).
If Julia lives 5 blocks west of the grocery store, we can plot her house 5 units to the left of the grocery store, so the coordinates of Julia's house are (-5, 0).
Plotting in the graph, we have:
The distance from Mary's house to the grocery store is 3 blocks, while the distance from Julia's house to the grocery store is 5 blocks.
That means Julia is the one who lives at a greater distance from the grocery store.
Since the distance from Julia's house is greater than the distance from Mary's house, we can write the inequality below:
If we want to state it in the inverse order (the distance from Mary's house is smaller than the distance from Julia's house), we can use the "lesser than" symbol:
