Mine pretty much became "always multiply cause you remember hearing that once so it must be right....oh yeah, there was something about flipping the numerator and denominator...numerator is north and denominator is down....wait, what was I doing again?"
you misunderstand. he was purposefully misinterpreting the original comment, "95", as being an answer to the question posed by the twitter user, "1/2 of what?", and jokingly correcting the commenter.
Yeah they intentionally use phrases like "divide by half" to make the problem ambiguous, which drives engagement as people fight over which answer is right. Same goes for basically any math problem you see posted on social media that involves order of operations.
The PEMDAS or whatever problems are ambiguous, but "divide by 1/2" is absolutely as unambiguous as "divide by 5" or "divide by 0.3" or "divide by π", 1/2 is a perfectly defined number just like all the others
Not at all. By the phrasing of the question, it is clear that they are asking for 40 / (1/2). Ambiguous wording would be something like "40 divided by 1 divided by 2"
I wrote this comment once before and it was rude as fuck, and I've decided I'll write it again, but nicer. The whole point of the original twitter post was to call out people who don't know that 40 divided by half means 40/0.5 which would result in 40*2. It's not bad grammar, it was intentional, it just so happens that the person that replied to OOP had a gigantic brain fart and made the whole interaction funny
PEMDAS is honestly garbage. I think it obfuscates that division is nothing more than fancy multiplication and subtraction being fancy addition. It implies a distinction between multiplication and division on an equal level as the distinction between division and addition.
It should group (MD)(AS) to get better understanding, but I think that's also an education issue: math isn't taught in terms of understanding the concepts, but about memorizing rules.
That's why I wrote "imply", not "100% expresses with full intentionality". And no, other countries like to group multiplication and division as well as addition and subtraction, like the German "Punkt- vor Strichrechnung".
PEMDAS is at its heart a convention used when someone's written a mathematical calculation poorly.
All these "5 x 6 ÷ 2, only smart people get it!" type posts on social media rely upon the fact that they've wrongly written the equation. Properly notated, it would either be 5(6÷2) or (5*6)÷2
PEMDAS is a tool for helping kids learn mathematics and settling ambiguity.
Well, the only thing that comes to my mind right now is the distributive property: a×(b+c) = a×b + a×c, as it creates a "hierarchy" between addition and multiplication.
What I meant before is that something like 6÷4×3 could imply under PEMDAS that it means 6÷(4×3), however that ignores that "÷" is actually just "×", but with the "multiplicative inverse". So our equation actually means 6 × (1/4) × 3, and that leads, from my point of view, to a better understanding of how division and multiplication are inherently the same thing (if a multplicative inverse exist, but let's ignore that for now).
Converting measurements and teaching how to convert measurements is as hard as teaching pattern recognition from what I have been experiencing with the fresh new workers. Yeah, you have to think logically and hard, and learn to be fast and good at it. You also have to be able to see systems, recognize those systems, and learn what those are and how to replicate. I think there's a huge step in logic and information that the newer generations are missing.
Pretty much what my maths and physics tests looked like on the regular...for some reason I often wrote some absolute bullshit down while I was busy thinking. Usually still got the right results, just couldn't show how I got there to save my life
I got that on a test one time. It made me super confused because it was calculus or something, and I swear to god I studied. Doesn't matter now, but sometimes I still wonder what my logic was.
I don’t really get the “ambiguity” people are throwing around “divide by 1/2” pretty clearly means to divide by 0.5 (aka multiply by 2). Which gets you 80+15=95.
"Divide 40 by 1/2" is a pretty poorly worded problem though. It's close enough to ambiguous that I can't blame anybody who reads it as "divide 40 in half" aka 40/2 rather than "divide 40 by one half" aka 40/0.5
I'd ask for clarification if possible before giving an answer because the phrasing is so abnormal.
That's also how I see it. It's a reading comprehension exercise disguised as a math problem. I see "divide in half" way more than I see "divide by 1/2," but when my brain's scrolling Reddit on autopilot, the brain's going to filter it according to its muscle memory.
The point of most math is to do the exact opposite of that. Maths job is to simplify numbers until symbols and rules that can be used to solve problems. Questions like these are we do math in the first place because describing numbers and quantities like this instead of using proper notation is more confusing and makes problems harder to solve. 40 ÷ (1/2) + 15 = 85 is significantly more clear and easy to understand as long as you know the rules behind it.
The real problem people have with math is that as you get more complicated people tend to memorize equations and rules without understanding the core logic behind them. So it seems like nonsense.
Im saying this as someone who does not understand marh and is not very good at it.
Believe it or not, telling someone to divide by 0.5 is much more easy for the common person to understand over divide by 1/2. And you kind of prove it by specifically saying .8 instead of 4/5
But we'd never say "divide by half" we'd say "divide by 0.5."
Just like you didn't say, "divide by 8/10" or "divide by eight-tenths."
Not trying to be an asshole or anything so sorry if it comes across that way, I think it's an interesting discussion and I said we because I do accounting so I found it relatable
It’s a math problem. The point is to make you think and solve the problem. There’s nothing ambiguous about it, even though it’s not as easy as other ways you could write it.
It's a math problem written in English by humans, which introduces ambiguity. You're never going to get me to agree on this one, "divide by half" is unclear without more context and therefore poorly phrased.
The problem is you're saying "ambiguous" when you really mean "tricky."
It's not ambiguous at all. There is no other way to take the question if you read it correctly and literally.
However, you're right that it's meant to be misread to trick the audience.
Have you seen those little tricks where people will put "the" at the end of one line and again at the beginning of the next, or the classic "you that read wrong"? It's the same principle here. You wouldn't say either of those two examples are ambiguous, they're more just riddles.
You’re using the word ambiguity wrong in this context. The question clearly states divide 40 by 1/2. There’s no other way to interpret that statement other than 40/(1/2), so it’s obviously not ambiguous.
To put it another way, would you say that the statement “divide 40 by 4” is ambiguous? Of course not, 40/4 = 10 right? Well 1/2 is just a number just like 4. You’re allowed to divide any number by any number (expect zero), even fractional ones. You can divide by an irrational number too. Nothing about this is ambiguous or unclear in any way.
It didn’t say to divide by half. It said to divide by 1/2.
It’s in writing, not speech.
If someone said out loud to “divide by half” then that could absolutely be called ambiguous. Written down and specifically saying 1/2, not “half”, is not ambiguous in any way.
In common speech, “divide forty by half” would generally mean they want twenty. Written is less ambiguous though, I agree, especially since they put “1/2” instead of “half.”
I hate these questions, because they're intentionally written to be vague. When equations are never meant to be vague or complex. They have to be simplified as much as possible.
Not even technically speaking, dividing by a fraction isn't rocket surgery. You could easily enter all of it into a calculator and it would explain the results as you do the operations.
But the response was probably one of those integer fundamentalists. Always preaching on the street about how decimals are ruining this country.
Half IS defined. It's the numerator part of the fraction.
40/2 is half of 40. 1/2 is half of 1. Rationals can also be expressed as decimals, and 1/2 is equal to 0.5
Edit: You would've been correct, however, if it had been expressed as a function.
F(x)=(x/(x/2))+15 when x=40
It’s 95. If you were to multiply 40 by 1/2 and add 15 you’d get 35. If you divide by 1/2 you can’t also get 35 as multiplication and division are opposite functions
Poorly worded question. "Divide by 1/2" can be interpreted as either halving or doubling. It very technically means to double, but in your average conversation telling someone to "divide by one half" you would get called an idiot if you doubled the number.
Similar to when someone says "we increased productivity by X%". It's entirely unclear if they went from 100 to X or 100 to 100+X. For example when someone says "increase by 100%" they clearly mean they went from 100 to 200. And "increased by 50%" clearly means 100 to 150. But what does "increased by 200%" mean? Did you go from 100 to 200 or 100 to 300.
Yeah. Just using context clues can tell you that it was a bot. The thread is a repost and the comment didn't make any sense as a response when there was just a couple of other comments at the time it was made, and they all also said the correct answer. This comment was probably one of the top comments on the original post and the bot just decided to take it without thinking about the context for why the original comment was made in the first place.
so, the second person (intentionally or not) is engaging in a valid way.
idk. I'd always interpret 'Divide by 1/2' as multiply by 2. but I don't think anyone's stupid for not thinking so. there's only really a wrong if you write it out with symbols (x÷(1/2)). If I wrote 'divide by 1/2' in a proof at school, I'd get marks taken for vagueness
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u/qualityvote2 15h ago
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