How is less than sign

Whichever number is larger, the alligator mouth is opened towards that number. If you were given 5 and 8 and were told to show which number is greater than or less than, the alligator would open his mouth towards the 8. This shows that 5 is less than 8.

The same would work if you were given 10 and 4. Here, we can see that 1 is less than 3. Thus, we can say that 14 is less than Given below are few more examples showing the comparison between numbers using less than sign. In mathematics, the less than and the greater than symbols describe the inequality between two values. Given below is the list of topics that are closely connected to the less than.

These topics will also give you a glimpse of how such concepts are covered in Cuemath. Example 1: Erica had to collect various kinds of leaves and paste them in 2 sheets. In order to place them all in two sheets, she pasted 8 on sheet-I and 9 on sheet-II. Which sheet has fewer leaves? Example 2: A cow weighs lbs. The weight of her calf is lbs. Which of them weighs less? Use less than symbol to represent this information. Less than as the name suggests, means something is lesser than in comparison to some other quantity.

The open side of the symbol should be in front of a bigger value. The underline in the symbol shows that the value could be equal to or more than the limit. James works at a departmental store, and he is paid on an hourly basis.

He can work for a maximum of 8 hours per day. This means James can work for less than or equal to 8 hours per day in the store. Let us represent the number of hours James worked as x hours. Both inequalities have different meanings. We can easily understand them by comparison. Here are some comparisons of these symbols and their examples along with their meanings.

Inequalities like less than or equal to and greater than or equal to are represented in a different way on a number line. To denote these, we use the closed circle to mark the limit value and point the arrow towards the given condition of inequality.

Let us see this on a number line given below:. We can see that when we want to denote 'x less than or equal to - 5', we marked a circle at - 5 and pointed an arrow towards the values less than - 5, as suggested in the condition of inequality.

Similarly, when we want to denote 'x greater than or equal to - 2', we marked a circle at - 2 and pointed an arrow towards the values greater than - 2, as suggested in the condition of inequality. I could have written 1 plus 1 minus 1 is equal to 3 minus 2.

These are both equal quantities. What I have here on the left hand side, this is 1 plus 1 minus 1 is 1 and this right over here is 1. Now I will introduce you to other ways of comparing numbers. The equal sign is when I have the exact same quantity on both sides. Now we'll think about what we can do when we have different quantities on both sides. So let's say I have the number 3 and I have the number 1 and I want to compare them.

So clearly 3 and 1 are not equal. In fact, I could make that statement with a not equal sign. So I could say 3 does not equal 1. But let's say I want to figure out which one is a larger and which one is smaller.

So if I want to have some symbol where I can compare them, where I can tell, where I can state which of these is larger. And the symbol for doing that is the greater than symbol. This literally would be read as 3 is greater than 1. And if you have trouble remembering what this means-- greater than-- the larger quantity is on the opening.