3 digit subtraction with regrouping basketball game

3 digit subtraction with regrouping basketball game

Subtraction of three-digit numbers

Two-digit numbers could be an easy task for a beginner but three-digit numbers? Those numbers can be a real challenge for our learners, but it is not complicated at all since vertical subtraction is very handy and versatile for any number of digits you need to subtract.
So, let’s get started with the number 537 as our minuend and pair it with a 129 as the subtrahend. Basically, what we are supposed to do is to put and align them together depending on their place values to perform vertical subtraction. We put 537 on top and 129 below it, then we can proceed and subtract them from each other, one column at a time.
On our first column, the numbers having the place value of ones, we need to subtract 9 from 7 but we can’t do that because 7 is smaller than 9. We must borrow from the next column so that our 7 could be bigger than 9. From the next column of 7, which is 3, we subtract 1 from it making it 2, and adding that 1 to the 7, each number borrowed from the next column will automatically have the value of 10, which will make our 7 become 17. We then subtract 9 from 17 and that would give us the first number of our difference, 8.
Then the next column has both 2 so if we subtract them from each other, it will only be 0 and we can move to the next.
Lastly, the last column which has the place value of hundreds, contains the numbers 5 and 1 which we have to subtract from each other giving us 4. Therefore, the difference between 537 and 129 is 408.
It is not as complicated as it looks to subtract three-digit numbers, if you know how to do the vertical subtraction and how to borrow numbers from the next column, then you can solve any subtraction problem no matter what the number of digits is given.