Subtraction Meaning

Subtraction represents the operation of removing objects from a collection. The minus sign signifies subtraction −. For example, there are nine oranges arranged as a stack (as shown in the above figure), out of which four oranges are transferred to a basket, then there will be 9 – 4 oranges left in the stack, i.e. five oranges. Therefore, the difference between 9 and 4 is 5, i.e., 9 − 4 = 5. Subtraction is not only applied to natural numbers but also can be incorporated for different types of numbers. That means we can also describe decreasing or removing physical and abstract quantities with various sets of objects such as negative numbers, fractions, rational & irrational numbers, decimals, functions, matrices and vectors.