My sister is struggling to complete her homework on negative countdown. She has to make the number $-5$ from $7,-3,-6,-3$ and $-4$. The only operations she can use is addition and subtraction and has to use all the numbers. Any ideas on how she could do it? She is in Year $7$ so she can't use powers and square roots. Plz help me!!!!!
2026-02-22 18:48:51.1771786131
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Negative Countdown
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Here is a hint - note that $4$ and $7$ are the only ones which aren't divisible by $3$ so aim for something that differs from $-5$ by a multiple of $3$ before adjusting using the other numbers.
Note also that subtracting just has the effect of changing the sign, so you could, if it helped, ignore signs at the beginning, and then fix them at the end.
$$-7+(-3)-(-6)-(-3)+(-4)=-5.$$