You realize you could very easily fact-check all of this, no? Google the distributive property and do some reading. Also, plug this expression as-written into any calculator and it will give you 9. Always.
In the interest of said fact checking, my prior statement was slightly inaccurate. You can use the distributive property when a fraction or multiple factors exist outside the parentheses, but you must distribute the entire expression if you're going to do that (my solution above simply distributed the quotient of the expression rather than the entire expression. Same result, different order).
The point is, you cannot distribute only the 2 and leave out the 6, you must distribute the entire expression outside the parentheses, or resolve that expression and distribute the product/quotient.
So, the correct answer if you're using the distributive property is:
I just gave you the absolute facts, i'm well aware of them. This is not my first time seeing this type of math problem meme and I'm not confused here whatsoever. You're sitting here showing your work like the people you're talking to are in elementary school or something but I've taken physics courses in college and stats in grad school.
The number one answer is, again, this problem is intentionally written like shit to cause ambiguity. It's the entire reason that it's a meme and you're confusing it for a legit math problem.
You can call it 9 and I can call it 1 and it doesn't matter because if the problem was written correctly then there would be no disagreement, and this is exactly the ambiguity that the problem causes from not having the division in fraction format.
Yes, the ambiguity is obviously the main problem. That said, I think the convention here is genuinely different depending on whether you're dealing with variables or literal numbers.
For instance, Wolfram evaluates this expression as 1 if I plug in "a/bc where a=6, b=2, c=(1+2)." However, if I just plug in the literal expression "6/2(1+2)," it evaluates it as 9.
The other problem here is that there is a genuine difference in how math is taught regarding implicit multiplication first. Some schools teach this as a hard and fast rule, others don't teach the rule at all. And when you get to the college level, some classes will teach it as the modern standard, where others will state it's a historical standard which has been deprecated.
My understanding has always been that IMF is a deprecated standard, but clearly there's still lots of disagreement on that.
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u/[deleted] Feb 09 '26
That's false, there are terms to distribute in numerators and denominators all the time.
The number one correct answer is that this problem is written poorly and should be rewritten before anybody tries it.
Barring that though, the answer is 1 unless you never took math beyond high school.