Assignment Sept. 17, Hints for thinking about "real" negatives

Assignment: Real Life Negatives - A

Welcome to the "real" world (as real as it gets in these examples) of negative integers.  Today you are to focus on what you are doing not how you write it.  
Mo's advice:
*Think about what the numbers represent.  Draw pictures on the page or in your mind, but use your imagination to think about the story behind the question.
*Associate!  These numbers all have values that go in a direction:  towards zero or away from zero. So if you go down the steps at Hogwarts, all of those downward steps represent going DOWN (aka a negative number, fyi) and all of the times you go UP get you higher (a positive direction).  Again, picture the story.
*HOW you solve these problems should be common sense.  I'm not at all concerned how you represent it mathematically, I want to know where you end up: behind the starting point?  above sea level?  above zero?  with less money?  How can you collect (commute and associate) the values of the numbers and use them to come up with an answer?   
Think about what you know to be true and then figure out how to get to that point.
EXAMPLES:  each with different answers, yet essentially the same numbers ...
A) If your horse is 7 miles away from Olympia, and runs for 5 miles towards Olympia, rests, then runs 4 more miles in the same direction, he ends up 2 miles PAST Olympia, right?  Right!
B) If your horse is 7 miles away from Olympia, and begins running to Olympia for 5 miles, but realized he forgot his baby horse, so he runs back for 4 miles, he is now  6 miles away from (before) Olympia, right? Try drawing that scenario.
*The rest of it is up to you.  I strongly, strongly recommend drawing yourself a simple scenario and figuring out what it is you want to know.  Don't worry about the negatives or positives, just think about what they represent in the story.  I keep saying this because it is key to your "aha" moment!
*And yes, labels are VERY important ... you MUST fill out the table and label the sets as we practiced in class. 

No calculators, you can do these!
Due Friday - Enjoy!  ;-)