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The Internet has stood divided on many things; the color of that atrocious dress, Yanny vs. Laurel, etc. However, off all things to go viral this year, I was not expecting a "fairly simple" math problem to be one of them. Then I actually looked at the problem and instantly started second guessing everything my public education taught me about numbers. "1+2=21? Wait, no. What?" I fell into a rabbit hole of research because there's no way I should have a college degree and get the answer wrong. Take a look at the math problem that has Twitter up in arms!
To most, this problem seems like simple math. Everyone seems to agree that you should start with the parentheses, aka the "P" in PEMDAS. The next step, however, is the reason why the math equation went viral. Twitter users had an absolute meltdown trying to figure out what the correct answer is. Some swore by 16 being the correct answer, but others explained that 1 was actually the answer. So, what is it? This is literally what twitter looked like trying to solve this equation and my brain hurts.
Moral to the story is that I'm still confused, but the discrepancy comes from where you learned "order of operations." Some learned it as "PEMDAS" (parentheses, exponents, multiplication, division, addition, subtraction) while other's learned it as "BOMDAS" (brackets, orders, division and multiplication, and addition and subtraction). Here's the best twitter breakdowns.
So what do you think? Let us know in the comments below! Meanwhile, I'm still over here like...where's my calculator?
