Dang...missed this thread before the answer came out. The order of operations is a basic math principle I'll remember to my dying day.

"Please Excuse My Dear Aunt Sally" is the mnemonic device commonly used to teach the "order of operations". The first letters in the device are used to represent the operations. They correspond as follows:

 

P - Parenthesis

E - Exponents

M - Multiplication

D - Division

A - Addition

S - Subtraction

 

They messed my mnemonic device all up for the planets when they threw out Pluto: My Very Educated Mother Just Served Us Nine-

 

Nine...? Nine What????????

I am too much of a cynic. I knew it could not be that easy.

 

Yeah, I just looked at it quickly and figured the trick was they were hoping you wouldn't notice the x sign before the 0.

Or ... there are people like me who are excellent at math (and love riddles) who still messed up. So PP92, take consolation that even people who are good at math also went left to right and did the good old ___ x 0 = 0.

By the way at the writing of this post, 0 is winning the poll 27-23. I bet every person who put down zero is 100% confident their answer is correct like I was.

 

This.

I knew the order of operations, but I didn't remember PEDMAS until it was brought up in the thread.

 

Not surprised by the result. Our secretary at work went on for two days about a problem similar to this and how you could get different answers depending on how you worked it. I knew immediately that it had to be something like this, but I didn't tell her. I wanted to see how long it would take her to figure it out. My boss finally told her and ruined my little private experiment. I heard her ask several friends on the phone and they didn't know. Another guy at work didn't know.

 

I always liked math, so I enjoy stuff like this. But, this is not a piece of knowledge that I've ever needed in the real world, and since many people don't like math, the results are not surprising.