FYP

But.... it's not.

Wasn't this covered earlier? Or did quirkasaurus just stumble upon a brilliant answer no one had thought of?

I have a math minor and I answered 2. I don't think any less of my math skills, but I do think less of my ability to read an equation that is intended to mislead the reader.

Care to enlighten about the part in bold?
Since there aren't secondary brackets you do everything from left to right, after adding 3 to 9.

just remember left to right.

I wasn't sure at first but i was about 70% confident that it was 288

I'm just saying of all the ways to write that equation, that has to be the least straight-forward one of them all. Maybe I misspoke when I said it was intended to mislead, but it's certainly not written with clarity in mind.

It's 288 by the order of operation. It's just written in a way that can confuse people and should be expressed better since it's definitely easy enough to think it's 2.

Legitimate LOL that the bodybuilders have a majority saying 2.

How could anyone think 2 is correct when they clearly changed the equation?

LOLZ.

There's lots of debatable responses in this thread. In a sense both 2 and 288 could be correct answers. The one answer that is clearly not correct is not realizing that the question is written to be intentionally misleading/confusing. That's the whole damn point.

Obv it's completely stupid and misleading and could be either. But having studied maths my whole life I can tell you that

a) it would never be written like this
b) if it was written like this, whatever BODMAS or whatever says, it would be taken to mean 48 / 2(9+3), ie 2
c) this debate is stupid

lol reading comprehension fail.
its always funny when people try to be condescending but failboat it up.
do you really not realize my statement is in no way mutually exclusive?

i grunched the thread, and yet the WHOLE THREAD still exists, and the funniest thing (to me) about THE WHOLE THREAD'S EXISTENCE, the poll results, and the sampling of responses i've seen is....

.

http://wimp.com/visualway/

i knew 2p2 had a lot of idiots.. didnt realize how many complete ******s there are on the forums..

wow, I thought this must be a level because of this being a pokerforum and thats like 4th year math, but you guys are actually serious about this thread

Math appears to be 50/50. You are either right or you are wrong.

You also have a very good read as to who on this forum is an intellectually arrogant prick.

48 / 2 x 12 = 24 x 12 = 288

/thread

^^^thank god you showed up to solve the problem.
now we can finally lock the thread!
we were all just waiting for you to show up and weigh in.

How the hell did this get to 10 pages

But srsly guise, this thread is a sin.

lets change the "2" to a "-1"

so it would be 48 ÷ -(9+3) = ?

now what's the answer to that?

-4

This.

Next we'll have a thread with the sentence "John hit the man with a stick" or "Mark is running down the road" and everyone will fight to the death over who has the stick and where Mark is. The whole point is that the expression is written to be ambiguous. If your conclusion is 100% anything, then you're wrong. Go ask a bunch of math professors (or whoever you would consider an authority on this sort of thing) and I guarantee you won't get a 'correct' response, just a bunch of people who can see how it could be justifiably interpreted both ways and agree that it's stupidly written.

Seriously? The picture is in support of it being 288. Nobody's using it to argue that 2 is correct.
It could be redrawn just about the same, only the left hand side of the top re-written (48÷2)(9+3) = ...
and the bottom saying
48÷2(9+3) = ...

Would your argument then become "How could anyone think 288 is correct when they clearly changed the equation?" or would you say "They changed the equation! They're changing the problem!"?

The picture is just a summary of one side of the argument - it isn't going to prove anything to anyone who doesn't already agree with it.

Im afraid its -2. edit- ok youre right. See I could have ninja edited my answer but im an honest soul.