The associative property of addition allows us to group two addends and then add the third addend to the result.
We can use this property in three ways:
1. We start by adding the first and the second addend, solve the sum and add the third addend to the result.
2. We start by adding the second and third addends, solve the sum and then add the first addend to the result.
- We start by adding the first and the third addend, solve the sum and then add the second addend to the result.
We will place in parentheses around the addends that we want to group first to give them priority in the order of operations.
The associative property of addition also works in algebraic expressions, but not in subtraction operations.
Let's define the associative property of addition as: