Danny: positive square roots what are these what does the positive mean?
Hi Danny,
I am going to tackle these as 2 separate questions.
Think about temperature. In summer it is hot and the temperature might be 20 degrees C or 80 degrees F (depending on how your country measures temperature)
Either way it is a normal number. However, I could put a + in front of the number and say it is +20 or +80 degrees.
(If there is no sign at all in front of a number then a positive is implied. That means that it is positive but the + sign might be invisable)
Now, if it is very cold in winter the temperature might be negative10 degrees Celcius, it is writtten as -10
0. (It never gets that cold where I live, but id does in lots of places)
That means it is even colder than 0 degrees.
You have probably used number lines at school the number on it are maked like
0,1,2,3,4,5,6,7, etc These are positive numbers, but the number line can go left from 0 as well.
My number line looks a little funny because the zero should look much more like the onther numbers. The up and down line at zero shouldn't be there. But i hope that you can see what I mean.
140127 number line.JPG
anyway, I hope that is negative numbers covered.
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Now we will look at what a square root is
first I have to explain what the square of a number is.
6 x 6 = 6 squared = 6
2 =36
Another way of writing 6 squared (that you will often see in this forum or on a calculator is 6^2)
If you multiply any number by itself then you are squaring it.
If you get the sqare root of the answer then you will go back to your original number.
so 6
2=36 therefore square root of 36 is 6
square root of 36 can be written as sqrt(36) there is also a maths symbol that you can use but I have to attach another picture to show you that
140127 sqrt36.JPG
I hope that all helps
+118654 
+2 
