A math problem 6/2(1+2)
Today, I read the newspaper, and found that there were a lot of people discussing this questions. You can read it from Yahoo! Answer. And there are a lot of people answering this expression equal to 9:
6/2(1+2) = 9
I really don’t understand the possibility of answering it as 9. Some of them said based on PEMDAS, it must be 9; also other said based on distributive property, it is 1.
My answer is 1, and it is impossible to be 9. If using variables for the value inside the parenthesis, then we will get
6/2(a+b)
= 6/(2a + 2b)
= 6/(2(1) + 2(2))
= 6/(2 + 4)
= 6/6
= 1
The above is the distributive property.
This is exactly same as 6/-1(3), which should read as 6/(-1(3)), but not (6/-1)(3).