Can someone explain Absolute Value

Can someone explain Absolute Value?

All I know is an absolute value can't be a negative number. Any help? Thank you!

Other Answers:

absolute value is the number of places a number is away from 0, like -5 is five places from zero, 4 is 4 places from zero.... get it?

Absolute value can best be thought of as distance between two points. Your starting point is zero, and the absolute value would be the distance from zero (thus it is always positive).

For any number x, the following is true:

|x| = x if x is non-negative
|x| = -x if x is negative

Hope this helps!

Negative is a direction, the number is the distance.

If you took 3 steps forward, you could think of that as a positive 3 steps. So, 3 steps back would be negative 3 steps. The distance traveled is the absolute value.

It doesn't matter if you took 3 forward or 3 back, you took 3 steps from where you started. That's why absolute value is only positive.

All you're looking for is distance from zero. This may be zero itself, but it cannot be negative. In absolute terms, 2 and -2 are the same thing: 2 away from zero.