Important Notice:

Practice-It will be discontinued as of November 1st, 2024. After this date, the website will remain online for a transitional period, but login will be restricted to University of Washington NetID authentication. This marks the next phase towards the platform's full retirement. Thank you for your use and support of the application over the years.

If you are looking for an alternative, a similar tool, CodeStepByStep, was developed independently by the original author of Practice-It, and is available at codestepbystep.com**

logo Practice-It logo

BJP4 Exercise 6.3: negativeSum

Language/Type: Java file processing Scanner
Author: Brad Goring (on 2016/09/08)

Write a method named negativeSum that accepts a Scanner as a parameter reading input from a file containing a series of integers, and determine whether the sum starting from the first number is ever negative. The method should print a message indicating whether a negative sum is possible and should return true if a negative sum can be reached and false if not. For example, if the file contains the following text, your method will consider the sum of just one number (38), the sum of the first two numbers (38 + 4), the sum of the first three numbers (38 + 4 + 19), and so on up to the sum of all of the numbers:

38 4 19 -27 -15 -3 4 19 38

None of these sums is negative, so the method would produce the following message and return false:

no negative sum

If the file instead contains the following numbers, the method finds that a negative sum of -8 is reached after adding 6 numbers together (14 + 7 + -10 + 9 + -18 + -10):

14 7 -10 9 -18 -10 17 42 98

It should output the following and return true, indicating that a negative sum can be reached:

-8 after 6 steps
Type your solution here:


This is a method problem. Write a Java method as described. Do not write a complete program or class; just the method(s) above.

You must log in before you can solve this problem.


Log In

If you do not understand how to solve a problem or why your solution doesn't work, please contact your TA or instructor.
If something seems wrong with the site (errors, slow performance, incorrect problems/tests, etc.), please

Is there a problem? Contact a site administrator.