Absolute Value Inequalities

The absolute value of a number measures its distance to the origin on

the real number line.

"less than" absolute-value inequalities
Given the inequality | x | < a, the solution is always of the form a < x < a.

"greater than" absolute-value inequalities
Given the inequality | x | > a, the solution always starts by splitting the inequality into
two pieces: x < a or x > a.
We can write this interval notation as

What is the geometric meaning of |x-y|?
|x-y| is the distance between x and y on the real number line.

Consider the example |(-4)-3|. The distance on the real number line between
the points -4 and +3 is 7, thus
|(-4)-3|=7.





Let's find the solutions to the inequality:



In English: Which real numbers are not more than 1 unit apart from 2?

We're talking about the numbers in the interval [1,3].

What about the example



Let's rewrite this as




which we can translate into the quest for those numbers x whose distance to
-1 is at least 3.

The set of solutions is



With a little bit of tweaking, our method can also handle inequalities such
as
|2x-5|<2.


We first divide both sides by 2. Note that absolute values interact nicely
with multiplication and division:

as long as a is positive.
Thus we obtain



after simplification, we get the inequality




asking the question, which numbers are less than 1 unit apart from

So the original inequality has as its set of solutions the interval .







Consider the example



Let's divide by 3:




which is the same as




Which numbers have distance at least from ? The set of solutions is
given by