4 + 3 x 5

We could either add the 4 and 3 and than multiply the result by 5 giving us 35 or we could multiply the 3 and 5 and than add the 4 giving us giving us 19.

As you can see depending upon the order we complete the operations we get two very different answers, so which is correct?

Well to help reduce confusion about the order of operations you can use the following convention. BODMAS is the agreed convention for answering problems that are a mixture of adding, subtracting, multiplying and dividing. It stands for

B – do what is inside the brackets first
O – Order is important in math
DM – do division and multiplication as you come to them from left to right
AS - do addition and subtraction as you come to them from left to right.

So for the problem above the correct solution would be:

4 + 3 x 5
= 4 + 15
= 19

No let’s look at a few other examples:

Example 1

18 - 6 x 3
= 18 – 18
= 0

Example 2

(18 – 6) x 3
= (12) x 3
= 36