Students are taught that absolute value is the distance of a number from zero and practice finding opposites on a number line (several images and activities ask students to compute |6|, |-6|, and opposites like -(-3)). Students use absolute value to decide which number is farther from zero when adding a positive and a negative (the rule "use the sign of the number that is farther from zero" and examples like 4 + -5). Students solve contextual problems involving debts and bank balances (Activity 5 asks students to write expressions for owing money and compares how much more one person owes than another).

Students complete a Basic Skills Review item that asks them to use <, >, or = to compare values including absolute values (e.g., problems and answer key showing |(-)16| > (-)16 and |(-)8 1/2| = |8 1/2|). The lesson asks students to compare given values and provides worked answers that explicitly compare absolute value expressions with negative numbers. Several practice items require students to reason about positive/negative numbers and absolute value in numeric comparisons.

Students practice operations with positive and negative rational numbers (e.g., 20 - 36 = -16, -14 - (-9) = -5, 35 - (-7) = 42) and are prompted to "change subtraction to add the opposite." The Parent Plan skills explicitly state that students should "show that the distance between two rational numbers on the number line is the absolute value of their difference, and apply this principle in real-world contexts." Several activities require evaluating and interpreting integer results and evaluating expressions with negative values.

Students are instructed to compute the mean absolute deviation (Step 4) and to record mean, median, mode, minimum, and maximum values for their data sets. Students create number-line based displays (dot plots and box plots) and identify the five-number summary, which requires locating values relative to each other on a number line.

Students represent debts and losses using negative numbers in multiple activities (e.g., Special Note: Why Debt is Written as a Negative Number and problems where −60 ÷ 5 = −12). Students solve and interpret real-world problems that produce negative results (e.g., ‘‘Each person owes −$12,'' ‘‘the average daily loss is −12,'' and word problems about losing money or splitting debt). Students write equations and explain results in context for scenarios involving negative balances (Activity 1, Activity 4, Activity 6).

Students are instructed to compute Mean Absolute Deviation (MAD) by finding the mean, subtracting the mean from each data value, and taking the absolute value of each difference (e.g., the turtle ages example shows |22−21.25|, |20−21.25|, etc.). The lesson's steps explicitly tell students to "take the absolute value (ignore negative signs)" and then average those distances, and several practice problems ask students to compute MAD for given data sets.