Wednesday, January 9, 2013

Less than symbol


Less than symbol
A less than symbol looks like this “ <”  which is commonly used in mathematics. A less than symbol shows the relationship between in two values. The value that is on the left hand side is less than the value that is on the right hand is a less than symbol.

What is less than Symbol? In a way we can think about this is symbol with, two lines when they meet it becomes a point and that is where we put smaller value. But the Right hand side it is open wide and that side we put larger value. So for example if we are putting number 3 and number 5 like this, 3 less than(<) 5 Here we will put 3 at the left side and number 5 at right side, so we can say 3 is less than 5, this is less than sign example.

Symbols less than can be useful when we do not know the value of something, but we can compare to a value, we know that it is less than a certain value. So for instance I can never remember how old is my cousin sister is. But I know that she is younger to me. Let us say I am 20 years old, but I do know my cousin sister’s age is less than 20 years old. So we can write like this, age of my cousin < 20 years. Here we can say by looking this less than symbol, that age of my cousin sister is less than 20 years.

Another example in math symbols less than we shall understand it by, let us say that I have the expression 12 times 6 less than 8000,that is 12*6 < 8000 Maybe I cannot do that very quickly in my head but I am pretty confident that whatever I get 12 times 6 is going to be less than 8000. So there are times, in which we know rules of relationship between two numbers and which we can demonstrate it with the less than symbol.

The less than symbol does not tell us, how much less one value than the other is. It just puts them in that order. Which indicates one portion is smaller than the other. So let us use few more examples, where we can use less than symbols. Let us say, 7 and 56 can we use less than symbol here? Yes, very much as we know on the left side 7 and on the right side 56, so as per the symbol indicates <   56 is larger than 7. So we can use less than symbol here. Thus we can write 7 < 56.



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