yego.me
💡 Stop wasting time. Read Youtube instead of watch. Download Chrome Extension

What order to do operations in


2m read
·Nov 11, 2024

If I were to ask you what is five minus three plus two, what would you say that is? Pause this video and try to figure that out.

All right, well, if you wanted to tackle this, you would really just read it from left to right, or you would compute it from left to right. You'd first figure out what 5 minus 3 is, and 5 minus 3 is equal to 2. And so you'd say, okay, that's going to be 2 plus 2, which of course we know is equal to 4.

Now, what if I were to involve a little bit of multiplication or division? If I were to go up to you and I were to say, what is five plus three times two? Pause this video and try to figure that out.

Well, you might be tempted to do it in a similar way. You might be tempted to say, okay, I'll just go from left to right. I'll first compute what 5 plus 3 is, and that of course would be equal to 8. And then I would multiply 8 times 2 to get 16.

But it turns out that this would not be the right way to approach this. For very good reasons that we'll study in perhaps future videos, we don't always go left to right, especially when we're dealing with different types of operations. The standard way that this is approached is that multiplication and division will be done before addition and subtraction.

So the way that you would actually compute this is that you would compute the 3 times 2 first. So you would say that this is the same thing as 5 plus 6. 5 plus 6, which is going to be equal to 11, not 16. So this is going to be equal to 11.

So with that out of the way, let's do a few more examples. Let's say someone were to approach you and say, what is 9 minus 6 divided by 3? Pause this video and see if you can figure that out.

Well, as I just said, we would do multiplication or division before we do subtraction. So we'll actually do the six divided by three first, and six divided by three is two. So this simplifies to nine minus two, which is equal to seven.

And I really wanna emphasize it's important that you get this idea that multiplication and division should be done before the addition or subtraction unless you're given some other types of directions. Because if you just went left to right here, you would have said 9 minus 6 is 3, and then you would have divided that by three, which would have given you one, which is clearly a different number than seven.

Let's do one more example just for kicks. Let's say that someone were to ask you, what is two times three minus one? Pause the video and try to figure that one out.

Well, in this one, doing our multiplication first is also the same as going left to right first. So if we do 2 times 3 first, 2 times 3 is 6, so that's 6. And then we would want to calculate 6 minus 1, which is of course equal to 5.

So, big picture, if you just have a bunch of things that are being added, subtracted, multiplied, and divided, and there's no parentheses in it, you would always prioritize the multiplication or the division over the addition or the subtraction.

More Articles

View All
The History of Not Forgotten - Smarter Every Day 269
Hello. Hello. Hello. Hey, it’s me Destin. Welcome back to Smarter Every Day. So every year I like to make a video about Not Forgotten, which is a Peruvian orphanage I work with. This year’s a little different. I usually make one to update you on the progr…
Let's talk about FTX.
So I’ve been waiting to talk about this since the situation seems to be changing every few minutes. But as some of you may have seen, FTX US has been a sponsor here on the channel for the majority of the year. Their international counterpart, however, FTX…
Earthquakes 101 | National Geographic
[Music] From above, the planet appears eerily still. But every mountain range and every chasm on its face is a scar, with many telling a story of when the earth rumbled to life. Earthquakes occur around the world; they’ve been recorded on all seven contin…
Crabzilla - Photographing a “Monster” Crab | Exposure
It has down all the elements: the legs, the pincers, the ice stalks, the antennae. So, I took a few images. The shadow looked amazing, the lighting was great, yet there was just something missing. Coconut crabs are really good indicators of how untouched…
Affect and effect | Frequently confused words | Usage | Grammar
Hello Garian, today we’re going to talk about two of my, well, I don’t know if I’d call them favorite, but two of my most frequently confused words. I make this mistake all the time, you know, and I think it’s important to keep it straight. So, affect and…
How To Improve Your Charisma
Do you ever wonder how some people seem to fit in everywhere and get along with literally everyone? Everybody wants to enjoy their company, talk to them, and wherever they go, there’s no such thing as a closed door or somebody standing in their way. Are t…