With sweet regularity, half the internet discusses math problems that are circulating. This can be extremely amusing, but very often degenerates into wild explanations and arguments. And this arithmetic problem has also been making people’s heads smoke for over three years. And as is so often the case, there is still no agreement on the result, which is why there is still lively discussion today.
At this point we assume that you got a result of either 1 or 16. At least that’s the result that most people – and calculators too – come up with.
The only question is: Which result is correct?
Without wanting to take the fun out of it, but both answers are possible. This is due to the misleading wording of the question, which was probably deliberately chosen, as one user also comments.
What everyone agrees on: the clamp must first be released. But then the consensus ends. The problem: Since the multiplication sign in front of the brackets is not explicitly in the exercise, you can get a result of 1 or 16, depending on which calculation method you choose. Let’s run through both variants.
Since there is no mark between the number 2 and the following brackets in the exercise, the 2 could belong to the brackets and be evaluated as an arithmetic command, similar to a power or square root. This means that the whole bracket is calculated first, according to the equation: 8 ÷ [2x(2 2)]
This article was first published in August 2019.
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