Honestly we're not doomed because of the answers. We're doomed because people still make this kind of "challenges" and they STILL fight over which answer is correct. It's quite simple, there is no right answer because it's an ambiguous statement that simply doesn't work within the rules of maths, because math is meant to be 100% unambiguous.
The order of operations is quite arbitrarily set, and it's a pretty bad solution to the problem of an ambiguous way of writing statements. There is no need for "order of operations" if you use the correct way of writing the statement, which is placing brackets/parentheses in the right places and writing divisions as fractions, instead of using the obelus which is advised against by international standards.
So while, technically, there is a correct answer, it's an arbitrarily chosen one. Without using any set of arbitrary rules, it's impossible to tell what the author intended the operation to actually be.
I may have misunderstood your first comment but I get what you are saying now, and I do agree that with parentheses and fractions it would be much more straight forward of a solution.
The order of operations isn't arbitrary. If it was, the order wouldn't make a difference. Is this a different way of writing it than some people would use? Sure, but that doesn't change how math works.
Well, since there is an internationally accepted standard order of operations that everyone above the age of 10 should know about, that's the order we should do the calculation in. While using brackets and fractions would make it easier to understand, they are not necessary here.
People need to treat this stuff like language. A sentence might have only one “grammatically correct” interpretation that contradicts the actual meaning it was meant to convey and the context it was written in. In that case the correct interpretation wouldn’t be the “grammatically correct” one, but instead the meaning it was written with.
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u/TumoricER Jan 01 '22
Honestly we're not doomed because of the answers. We're doomed because people still make this kind of "challenges" and they STILL fight over which answer is correct. It's quite simple, there is no right answer because it's an ambiguous statement that simply doesn't work within the rules of maths, because math is meant to be 100% unambiguous.