Andre has six cards with one number written on each side of each card. The pairs of numbers on the cards are 5-12, 3-11, 0-16, 7-8, 4-14, and 9-10. The cards can be placed in any order in the blank spaces of the figure. What is the smallest result you can get? Let's consider two cards, for which the smaller numbers are A and B and the larger numbers are A and B, with A plus A less than B plus B. Then we note that A minus B is less than B minus A. So we want the smallest result possible, we will take the three cards with the smallest totals and put their smaller numbers in the positive slots. Then we take the remaining three cards and put their larger numbers in the negative slots. This will give us the result 3 plus 0 plus 7 minus 12 minus 14 minus 10 which is negative 26.

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smallest result

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negative slots