Subtraction:

Subtraction is the opposite of addition. Where in addition, you are attempting to find the total of two or more parts, in subtraction, you are taking away from the total or finding the difference between the total and one of its parts.

It is expressed as:

or

The good news is that once you know the addition tables by heart, it is easy to perform subtraction. For example: if you know (remember) that 3 + 5 = 8, then it is true that 8 - 5 = 3 and that 8 - 3 = 5.

SUBTRACTION TABLE:

Let us now consider subtraction, where the numbers have two or more digits. Let us look at the following example:

As we have done with addition, we start with the singles digit of the second line and we subtract it from the singles digit of the first line. Since we know that 9 - 3 = 6, we will show as our first step:

Next, we proceed to the tens digit and we subtract 1 from 2: 2 - 1 = 1, so that our next and final steps is to show:

And 16 is our correct answer.

The task becomes a little more difficult, if we have the following example:

How is it more difficult? Well, following the rule of subtracting the single digit of the second line from the single digit of the first line, we will subtracting 8 from 2 and since 2 is less than 8, how do we do this?

Easy, instead of subtracting 8 from 2, we will subtract 8 from 12 and the answer will be 4:

Now, we must remember to do the following step:

Since we have raised the value of the singles digit of the first line by 10, we MUST raise the tens digit of the second line by one (if we add 1 to the tens digit, we are in effect rasing the number by 10). SO, instead of subtracting 1 from 3 as our next step, we will subtract: 3 - 2 and the answer will be 1.

To check our answer, let us add the number we have just subtracted (18) and our result (14):

Since 4 + 8 equals 12, we will put down 2 in the singles digit of the result and remember 1 as the carryover for our tens digit:

With the carryover of 1, we will add 2 + 1 = 3 and our result is therefore:

What about numbers with more than two digits?

Well, how about:

Out first step will be to subtract 9 from 16 (while remembering the carryover of 1 to the tens digit of the second line):

Our second step will be to subtract 7 from 13 (6 is increased to 7 by the carryover of 1 from the singles digit and now, we have to remember a carryover of 1 from the tens digit):

As our last step, we will subtract 2 - 2 (1 in the hundreds digit of the second line is increased by the carryover of 1 from the tens digits) and the result is 0.

Our answer is therefore:

Now add 67 + 169 to check the answer:

Examples:

Answers: