Good one. Perhaps you’ll in some way appreciate the number I invented…it’s a googologoog, which is a 1 followed by one hundred zeros, then a decimal point, followed by one hundred zeros then concluding with a 1. The googologoog has the distinction of being the largest named number greater than a googol but lesser than any other named number greater than a googol.
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Oh god. Is this the moment? The moment when the STEM bros discover that all language - even mathematical language - is inherently ambiguous, and that reading and comprehension is highly context dependent, and that this might be worthy of study? Are they finally going to become self-aware?
Nah, they’ll just fall into dogmatic schisms as always. So close, though. So close.
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touché
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The answer is “the question is wrong”.
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I was thinking how sad it is that something supposedly as clear and logical as maths can be weaponised to create division and argument.
Perhaps the important thing is which answer is the Woke one.
Or, y’know, the problem might be in that “supposedly clear and logical” part. There’s no such thing as long as things such as language (including mathematical language), reasoning, squishy fleshy brains, and systems of logic existing within cultures depending on the former are involved. Everything has some level of ambiguity. Always. And there’s an argument to be made for the desire for clear-cut, unambiguous answers - nay, rules - being the source of this division and argument in the first place. Teaching people simple answers without hammering in that there are always exceptions inevitably results in people being pissed off when they are confronted with those answers being wrong.
The reasonable, non-dogmatic reaction to this would be something along the lines of “huh, this can be read in two different ways. Interesting!” Instead, people are (falsely) taught that mathematical language has clear, unambiguous and universally accepted rules and can only be misinterpreted by human error, which leads to these stupid dogmatic arguments over nothing.
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The same old internet stupidity. Don’t get in the middle of one of these if you can avoid it.
Better to ask what led somebody to write the equation that way. That is, WHY do you want an answer and where did the values originate?
If you don’t know the basics, then stop right there.
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Not even close. This happens every few months. Not sure if it’s always the same equation or not, but it’s the same old same old.
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And this is why algebra is essentially a set of magic spells, where what happens to what is kind of arbitrary.
These clickbaity problems always make me mad. The whole reason there are rules for such things is to avoid ambiguity. Nobody would actually write an expression like that if it mattered. These are just out there to generate clicks and get people mad to generate revenue.
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I was taught BODMAS and PEMDAS and I would process that equation differently, because I was taught to deal with the bracket first.
That means ALL the bracket. Two Steps.
First step: what’s inside the bracket: 2 + 2 = 4.
Second step: what’s OUTSIDE the bracket. The implicit multiplcation which is in fact, part of the bracket. 2(2+2) == 2(4) == 8.
This gives us 8/8, which is 1.
But I admit there is ambiguity. That’s why when some bugger posts a problem like this on social media, you should just walk away.
Or if you must, reply “AMBIGUOUS!”
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I apologize if someone has already covered this, but I got tired at comment 40. The real answer to this problem is that this kind of a question is nothing more than an engagement question. These things are designed to get people to comment and share, largely out of anger. And it really fucking works. Posts like this have been popping up in various social media for years, and it always generates a fuck ton of comments, and here I am engaging in it as well. Shit. Anyway, yeah, stop arguing about stupid shit like this. It’s partly what drives the horribleness of social media.
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Dear god, please never let me get so old that I start replying to the, “No one has gotten this right. There isn’t a girls name with two As in it. Prove me wrong!”
Or some riddle.
I like being right like most people, but:
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That one’s too easy. “Aardvark.”
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this is not a thread about elon musk’s children 
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Clearly you are a JavaScript programmer. Or you’ve been hurt by one…
We can smell our own.
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The second step is where you go off the rails. Inside the brackets (or parentheses, or whatever) first, then everything else from left to right, using normal rules of precedence. Ie. multiplication and division first (it’s really the same operation), then addition and subtraction (again, really the same operation).
Edited
Woke.up without enough coffee. Got.grumpy. Posted Something.
Replacing comment with this comment on nothing. Sorry.
So heres a funny video:
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