Here is the second of our pages on negative numbers, involving ordering 5 numbers from the least to the most.
This is probably a good time to distinguish between using the ‘minus’ sign to perform a subtraction and using it to indicate a negative number. In my time at school the word ‘minus’ was used for both and we learnt all sorts of tricks such as ‘two minuses make a plus’ which are not always as helpful to understanding as at first thought.
In the context of reading numbers it is better to call ‘-2’ as ‘negative two’.
Putting two numbers in order on a number line follows one simple rule; the number to the right is always the larger numberof the two. So -3 is smaller than -1.
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