Basic Math Problem - 8 divided by ( 6 - 10 ) times 2

Welcome to MooMooMath and Science. In this video, let's go over how to solve an equation like this, and then we're going to introduce PEMDAS. If you take a moment and solve this, you could easily come up with two answers. You could come up with a negative 4, or you could come up with a negative 1. And only one of these answers is correct. So this is where the order of operations comes into play, and an easy way to remember this is PEMDAS. Let me take just a second to go over this. The P stands for parentheses, the E is an exponent, like 2 squared, here is the exponent, we have multiplication, we have division, we have addition, and subtraction. The parentheses and exponents are pretty straight forward. This does not necessarily, when you get to multiplication and division, it doesn't mean that if you see multiplication first, you go multiplication, or you see division first. They are equal. Remember you always work from left to right. So if division comes first, like here, then you do division first. You would do division, then maybe if you have some multiplication, you do multiplication. Or if multiplication comes first, you go multiplication. And the same rules work for addition and subtraction. Addition does not always come before subtraction. It's whatever appears first, so they're kind of equal. Again, you always work from left to right. Now let's go ahead and apply the rules of the order of operations using PEMDAS. Let's start with parentheses. Do we have a parentheses? Yes. So let's go ahead and start there. We have a positive 6 and a negative 10. Remember when you have a positive and a negative, it's going to be a negative. So 10 minus 6 is 4, and it's going to be negative. So now let's bring down this 8. Now we have 8 divided by negative 4 times 2. Now do we have exponents? No. So we need to move the multiplication and division. And remember, it's whatever appears first. So we have division first. We're going to go 8 divided by negative 4, and that gives you a negative 2. Because remember, if you have same signs, it's positive. If you have opposite signs, it's negative. Then we're going to bring down the multiplication. So now we have a negative 2 and a positive 2, and that becomes 4. What's the sign going to be? Well, there's a couple ways you can look at it. Whenever you have an odd number of negative signs when you multiply or divide, it's always negative. And if you had a positive number, like if it was negative 2 times negative 2, you have a positive number, 1 plus 2, then it's positive. So anyway, here is our answer. It is negative 4. I hope that was helpful in figuring out the order of operations in solving this problem.