The answer is 1, why is everyone a delinquent?
Y'all please, learn your pemdas (or bodmas or whatever you learned it as)
It’s 16
*sigh*
Parentheses equation is 2+2, which is 4.
Now we multiply by 2 to get 4x2 which is 8
8 DIVIDED BY 8 is 1.
I have no fucking clue how you can get 16 out of this. I don’t think you’re bad at math, I think you just need glasses.
It’s 1.
It’s 16.
8 / 2 * (2+2) =
8/2 * (4) =
4*4 = 16
You do the parentheses, then you go left to right.
That isn’t how this works…..
PEMDAS
8/2*(2+2) (P = Parentheses)
8/2*(4) (M = Multiply)
8/8=1 (D = Division)
@kingoftartesoss
Use Mathpapa calculator if you still don’t believe me.
No, Riley.
M isn’t in the original problem but 8÷2 still needs a resolution. You have to solve 8÷2 as-is after (2+2) no matter what.
So you’re not following PEMDAS by factoring x4 into 8÷2.
It’s literally this simple.
I, uh, I think it’s 1, actually.
Plug it into a searchbar, or a scientific calculator that waits until the whole thing is input & that’s the answer.
No need.
Everyone on this post:
@nonanalogue can you solve this for us because I swear to goodness the answer is 1 but this post is making me doubt my brains
Happily!
So the problem is two-fold: first, order of operations as most people are taught it is a lie, and second, the original problem is written very ambiguously.
Let’s drill down into that first point.
PEMDAS! Parentheses, exponents, multiplication, division, addition, subtraction. Everyone’s taught to do operations in that order! Except that’s not really right. As a math teacher of mine put it, “it works for now, but you’ll find out I was lying in a few years.”
The problem is that multiplication and division are the same operation, and addition and subtraction are also the same operation. Division is really just multiplying by a fraction, and subtraction is just adding a negative. With that in mind, it doesn’t necessarily make sense to do some multiplication arbitrarily early in the problem before the rest! As a result, here’s the bottom line for that point:
Both 1 and 16 are right.
How can that be?
Well, that brings me to the second point: the expression is written very ambiguously, so as to maximize confusion! It’s also why I don’t like using the division symbol when a fraction will do just nicely.
Observe two other ways we could write this expression:
The first one resolves to 8/8, which is 1. The second resolves to 4(4), which is 16. Both are right, only because the original expression is vague.
The sad thing is that everyone hates fractions, when actually they make life so much nicer!
Just in case you thought math didn’t have the same problems with ambiguity that language does XD
which I think is why you’ll almost NEVER see the division symbol in math once you start hitting like Algebra and shit.
@nonalogue is right, the ÷ symbol is a garbage symbol that should never be used or taught because it makes everything worse. Teaching people fractions and division separately is a fool’s errand because they’re the same thing and writing them as fractions makes things like this less ambiguous
I love how angry everyone in the thread got until it turned out everyone was right and wrong.
And yeah when we learned PEMDAS we were taught that it’s really P, E, (MD), (AS), and that the M/D and A/S components were equals and interchangeable so we could always just do them left to right.
I feel like this is in the ranks of the “every odd number has an ‘e’ in it” post.
