When solving a problem involving money, a negative answer can represent an overdrawn account or an amount owed.
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If you use positive numbers to represent money which you have or are owed (credit), then use negative numbers to represent debits.Remember, though, that sometimes the choice of which of the two is positive is arbitrary and depends on you. If I owe you money, the situation would be represented by a negative number in my accounts but a positive entry in yours.
If Susan owes $50 to her friend, and then receives a payment of $75 from another friend, how much money does Susan have?
When people are in debt! You can owe people so much money that you actually have a negative amount of money.
That's right, negative numbers are less than zero. If you have trouble with this concept, think about money. If you have no money and you are also in debt, that is the equivalent of having a negative amount of money. Even when you get some money, if you use it to pay off your debt you could still be left with no money. So with a negative quantity, you need to add to that quantity just to get to zero.
Finding the unit price of an object when the price for several of them is not a whole number of currency units. For example, how much is each banana if a bunch of four bananas costs 1.44?