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RE: BILL NYE THE "ELITE GLOBALIST PUPPET" GUY? - Globalism, Pizzagate, Flat Earth, & "Science"
I wasn't one of the 800 people to watch the video. I feel like I can get the gist of it. I never really watched him, but I've known who he is. I think that he has gotten very political recently and that's turned a lot of people off from watching him.
Hey, I'm an advocate for math! At least I enjoy talking about some math, specifically finances. I did see this equation on Musing recently and it surprised me that more people had the wrong answer than the right one!
"What is 6÷2(1+2) = ?"
https://musing.io/q/rachel1998/fkjudld95
With three seconds of thought put into it, I would guess 1. I wonder if I'm in the majority.
Three seconds is about right to solve such a basic problem. You got the correct answer, so you're not in the majority. Good job!
I've been told that people have been playing with the rules students are supposed to follow to solve these problems. Once the parentheses are solved, just work left-to-right and combine the division and multiplication in the same step instead of following PEMDAS sequentially. However, I would argue that if a specific answer is desired, the problem needs to be written more clearly to eliminate ambiguity.
Yep, that's how you do it in this equation. To resolve the parentheses, you have to multiply the 3 inside the parentheses by the 2 that's outside. It modifies what's inside. The other way of doing it to confirm this is by using the distributive principle and multiplying the 2 into the parentheses first, then adding. This results in the same answer: 1.
I'm not sure why people would be messing with how the students are supposed to solve these. 10 years ago there wouldn't have been a question about it, but now apparently it's a big thing. Strange. :)
But then there's this kind of obfuscation
There are some things that don't make sense because they're presented in a confusing way (like the example at the end of the article: a/b/c. It's not clear what the order of operations is intended to be.)
The other example at the end (ab/cd) is straightforward and not ambiguous as the writer indicated. It's been a long time since I worked with mathematics, so forgive me for not knowing the correct terminology. However, if you're working with math that uses letters, it's clear that ab/cd means (a x b) / (c x d).
Likewise, unless they (US Board of Education or whoever) is changing how they want equations written, then the 2(3) implied multiplication happens before the 6 is divided. Otherwise you haven't resolved the parentheses.
For any BOE member who might look at this, I would say again that they would be ignoring the distributive principle by making that change. The "2" can be added or removed using the distributive principle, but if they do the division in the equation first, then it's inconsistent.
I do find the psychology behind the uproar on Facebook very interesting though!
Woo Hoo! Odd Man Out again!!!!