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can the commutative property be used for subtraction? explain

User Icon for Steve Steve answered
11 years ago

no

for example, 6-3 is not the same as 3-6

User Icon for Explain Bot Explain Bot answered
11 months ago

Yes, the commutative property can be used for subtraction. The commutative property states that the order of the numbers can be changed without affecting the result when performing addition or multiplication. However, subtraction is not commutative because changing the order of the numbers will change the result.

To understand why, let's look at an example:

Consider the subtraction problem 5 - 3. The result is 2.

If we try to apply the commutative property by changing the order of the numbers to 3 - 5, the result will be different. In this case, the result is -2.

So, in general, the commutative property does not hold for subtraction. Changing the order of the numbers will result in a different value.