We have negative 3/4 minus 7/6 minus 3/6.
And there's many ways to do this.
But it immediately jumps out at me
that these last two numbers have a 6 in the denominator.
So I'm going to worry about these first.
I'm going to view this as negative 7/6 minus 3/6.
So if we have negative 7/6 minus 3/6,
that's going to be the same thing as negative 7 minus 3
over 6.
And of course, we have this negative 3/4
out front that we're going to add
to whatever we get over here.
So this is these two terms that I'm adding together.
Negative 7 minus 3 is negative 10.
So it's negative 10 over 6.
And then I'm going to have to add that to negative 3/4.
And now I have to worry about finding a common denominator.
Let me write that so they have a similar size.
So now I have to worry about finding a common denominator.
What is the smallest number that is a multiple of both 4 and 6?
Well, it might jump out at you that it's 12.
You can literally just go through the multiples of 4.
Or you could look at the prime factorization
of both of these numbers.
And what's the smallest number that
has all of the prime factors of both of these?
So you need two 2s, and you need a 2 and a 3.
So if you have two 2s and a 3, that's 4 times 3 is 12.
So let's rewrite this as something over 12
plus something over 12.
Well, to get your denominator from 4 to 12,
you have to multiply by 3.
So let's multiply our numerator by 3 as well.
So if we multiply negative 3 times 3,
you're going to have negative 9.
And to get your denominator from 6 to 12,
you have to multiply by 2.
So let's multiply our numerator by 2 as well so
that we don't change the value of the fraction.
So that's going to be negative 20.
And now we're ready to add.
Our common denominator is 12.
And so this is going to be negative 9 plus negative 20,
or we could even write that as minus 20,
over 12, which is equal to-- and we deserve a drum roll now.
This is negative 29 over 12.
And 29 is a prime number, so it's not
going to share any common factors other than 1 with 12.
So we also have this in the most simplified form.