Ron Clark is an American educator. He wrote this song to help students learn the order of operations. You may find this song helpful if you don't like learning acronyms or mnemonics.
Chapter 19: Fundamental Mathematics
pg: 198 - 200
Essential skills for science and technology
by
"Order of operations" is a fancy mathematicians' way of saying "when solving this equation, what do I do first (and second, third, fourth, etc)?".
Attempting a maths equation isn't like reading english, in that we don't necessarily work left-to-right (coincidently, it's also not like Japanese, which can be read top-to-bottom, or Hebrew, where they read right-to-left).
Instead, in maths we need to consider what types of calculations ("operations") need to be carried out to solve the equation, and these are performed in an order which is predefined (by BEDMAS).
You might remember BEDMAS from school. It stands for:
BEDMAS tells us the order in which to attempt a question like the one from facebook (see "What would you answer", to your left)
Need more practice? Additional worked examples are available here:
http://mathsfirst.massey.ac.nz/Algebra/OrderOfOp/orderofop.htm
The following question was shared by a friend on facebook …
What answer would you give, and WHY?
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