How do you simplify -3 * -5 * 2?

1 Answer
Apr 23, 2018

30

Explanation:

To solve this, you want to multiply all of the numbers together. To start, it's usually best if you begin with the first two numbers. In this case, it would be -3 and -5.

When multiplying with integers, the numbers that you are multiplying can be positive or negative, and depending on this, your answer will either be positive or negative. Here's a list of the rules to follow when multiplying negative and positive integers:

  1. When there is an odd number of negative signs, then your answer will be negative.
  2. When there is a positive number of positive signs, your answer will be positive.
  3. When there is a positive number of negative signs, your answer will be positive.

Now that we know these rules, we can multiply normally. Our first components are -3 and -5. We see that there are two negative signs here, so we know that our answer will be positive. Now we multiply our numbers together and get 15.

Now that we have the answer of these two numbers, we can multiply the product times the third number, 2. There are two positive signs, so our answer will once again be positive. 15 times 2 is 30, so our answer is 30.

I hope that this helped!