I'm reading Cormen, Leiserson, Rivest and Stein, Introduction to Algorithms, Appendix A, page 1152. They discuss a method called "Splitting Summations", where they split the summation and bound each term separately. For example,
$$\begin{align*} \sum_{k=1}^{n} k &= \sum_{k=1}^{n/2} k + \sum_{k=n/2 + 1}^{n} k\\ &\geq \sum_{k=1}^{n/2} 0 + \sum_{k=n/2 + 1}^{n} (n/2)\\ &= (n/2)^2\\ &= \Omega(n^2)\,\end{align*}$$
I didn't understand step 2 where they have replaced $k$ with $0$ in one part and $k$ with $n/2$ in other. How does this method work? Can anybody explain?