How do you plot a point with negative coordinate? - Answers

The normal convention used in the Cartesian coordinate system is that everything above the x axis is positive and everything below the x axis is negative, and everything to the right of the y axis is positive, and everything to the left of the y axis is negative (the two axes are themselves neither positive nor negative, they represent zero). Since points on a graph are identified by an ordered number pair, giving first the value of x and then the value of y, there are two numbers; you can have two positive numbers, or you can have one positive and one negative number, or you can have two negative numbers. The point that you are graphing will be located in the appropriate quadrant of the graph. Two positives are in the upper right hand quadrant, two negatives are in the lower left hand quadrant, and a positive and a negative can be either the upper left hand quadrant or the lower right hand quadrant.