Question

Mrs. Rodriguez is a teacher at Westbury Middle School. She gives bonus points on tests for outstanding written answers and deducts points for answers that are not written correctly. She uses rational numbers to represent the points. She wrote the following on students’ papers: Student A: −2 points, Student B: −2.5 points. Did Student A or Student B perform worse on the test?

Answer 1

Student B.

Explanation:

Student B performed worse than student A on the test because the score -2.5 is farther away from 0 than the score -2. This means that more points were deducted from student B (score -2.5) than from student A (score -2), and since points are deducted for answers that are not written correctly this means that student B made more mistakes.