Comment on problem 4 & 5

The facts mentioned in these two problems

can be applied without justication in the future (After all they are trivial).
But if you don't nd it trivial or you cannot mentally justify their validity in a
ash, it probably means you don't have a good picturization of the role played
by the absolute value.
A good way to interpret absolute value is to think of it as measuring

R, x an a R,
x to point a on R, or equivalently
a function (with Dom(f ) = R) when you feed it with an x, it
spits out the distance from x to a. Then  |x a| < d  is equivalent to  x has
to be a point whose distance to a is (strictly) less than d , which is equivalent
to say that x lies in the interval (a d, a + d).

distance:

think of real numbers as points on the real line

|x a| measures
f (x) = |x a| is

the distance from point