# Why does my question get down voted? Should “simple” questions get voted down?

My question:

What possible values of $a$ lead to the inequality $|f(x_1) - f(x_2)| \gt |g(x_1) - g(x_2)|$.

I don't understand why I get voted down and there are even people suggesting that it should be closed. I stated my question and provided my attempt and where I got stuck. I guess it's because my question is too simple. But I really don't know how to solve that problem! Why should my question get down voted?

• If your post on meta is about this one particular question, you should tag it (specific-question). If the questions you linked serves merely as an example and you want to discuss here some more general issue, then this tag is not needed. See the tag-info for more details. – Martin Sleziak May 19 '16 at 15:06
• At a glance I would guess the downvotes(?) are based on a lack of clarity. You open the Question by making what appear to be assertions or assumptions, that the condition featured in the title holds for a particular pair of functions $f,g$, one of which depends on a parameter $a$. My guess is the problem is determining for which values of $a$ the condition holds. You just don't clearly state that is your goal. Especially confusing is the final statement, "This question is about derivatives, if that helps." This is the first point in the post anything is said about derivatives. – hardmath May 19 '16 at 15:23
• I reformulated your paragraph a bit (you can always revert the edit if you didn't want that). I hope it a bit clearer now. I also changed the title. – Najib Idrissi May 19 '16 at 15:50
• @hardmath Well, I used that condition as the title because that is my main problem (where I got stuck): I don't know how to deal with conditions like that, with absolute values and two variables. And about the final statement: this problem comes from my exam (at the high school level) and I'm sure the solution uses derivatives (from past experience, etc.), so I wrote "if that helps". – Colescu May 20 '16 at 5:51