[ High School and Self-Education Board ]
Posted by cb in socal on 11:40 May 2
In Reply to: Needing a little more math help posted by Des
I taught my kids how to remember what order to do their mathematical operations in with my old Oklahoma math teacher's, "Mama Shirley's", formula: "Do your PE first. Then remember My Dear Aunt Sally." The initials are an acrostic:
P (Parenthesis)
E (exponents)
M (multiply)
D (divide)
A (add)
S (subtract)
In your problem, since the multiplication operation and the exponential operation are separated by a minus sign, you can do either one first. I multiplied your 7/8 x 2/3 and got 14/24. Then I squared the 1/2 and got 1/4. Then I subracted: 14/24 - 1/4. You can reduce 14/24 to 7/12 and your subtraction becomes: 7/12 - 1/4. Get a common denominator of 12. So it becomes 7/12 - 3/12 which is 4/12 which reduces to 1/3 or .33333 on calculator. Hope that helped. P.S. This is "really cheesey", as my kids say, but in the Google search engine, you can type in any math equation and it will solve it for you. There's a built-in calculator there. You can check answers that way. Blessings, C