If you haven't read How to Solve an Equation by Sam, go read that first.

How to Solve Equations Correctly

Introduction

What are you supposed to do when you get something like x(2πr÷3)²6+2x? Don't worry, it's less complicated than it looks. When you solve equations, there's a certain order that you must follow. Most teachers teach it using the acronym BEDMAS or PEMDAS. Bedmas stands for:

  1. Brackets
  2. Exponents
  3. Division
  4. Multiplication
  5. Addition
  6. Subtraction

Brackets

Whenever you come across an equation, solve it in the above order. Let's go back to our equation. For the purpose of our example, we'll let x be equal to 5, and y be equal to 3.

x(2y÷3)²6+2x

According to BEDMASS, the first thing to do is solve the brackets.

(2y÷3)

All we have to do is solve everything inside. First, change all the variables to their true value if we know them.

(2·3÷3)

Now, we have a simple equation that we can easily solve. 2 times 3 is 6. Divide that by 3 and you get 2. You may have noticed that I did the multiplication before the division, even though multiplication is #4 and division #3. This is because they are similar, so you do whatever one comes first. The same goes for addition and subtraction.

Exponents

x(2)²6+2x

The second item on our list is exponents. These are the smaller numbers that on the right side of a number. You can find the exponent in our equation here. (2)²To solve exponents, multiply its host number by itself however times the exponent is. So we do 2 times itself. That gives us 4. If the exponent were 0, then the value would be 0 because it is 2 times nothing. If it were 1, then we would get 2 because 2 times 1 is 2. If the exponent were 3, then we would get 8.

Proper Notation

x·4·6+2·x

Now, we are left with simple multiplication and addition. However, we must first correct the order of the equation. Variables, if multiplied by a number should follow the numeral and not the other way around so x4 should be 4x. Following this rule, we get:

4x·6+2x

Which is equal to:

4·5·6+2·x

Multiplication &/OR Division

Because multiplication & division we do from left to right, we do 4·5 first. After we do all the multiplication, we are left with:

120 + 2x

We do the multiplication first. After that, we get:

120 + 10

Addition

I think you know how to add numbers. Anyway, we do the addition last and get a final answer of 130.

Thank you for reading, I was working on another post but I accidentally deleted it so I wrote this about this topic instead. I'm personally not very good with math. So I understand when you don't understand something. Hope this helps (probably won't cause you learn this stuff early on).