Most parents will know the feeling of dealing with a tricky question in their kid’s school homework.
Earlier this week, Martin Lewis shared a question in his daughter’s maths homework which left everyone stumped.
Writing to his 1.1 million followers online, he said: “Just had an interesting chat with mini MSE while she was doing maths homework.”
The Money Saving Expert founder then revealed the tricky question which was 5 + 6 x 4.
It has already racked up 1,400 likes and hundreds of retweets since it was posted on Thursday.
But while some people knew the sum, others were clearly frazzled by it.
Martin revealed the answer: “29 is right. 44 is wrong. Owt else you’re very wrong.
“It’s due to the BIDMAS rule. The order you do calculations so brackets, indices, division, multiplication, addition subtraction.
“So in this case you do 6 x 4 then add 5.
Many fans flooded the comments section with a fair few puzzled as to how vague the question was.
One Twitter user remarked: “Am I just old school as answer is surely 44!”
A second questioned: “Where are the brackets?”
While another added: “The key point is that it *shouldn’t* have a level of ambiguity about it.
“By omitting parentheses, it’s like having a sentence with a subclause, but you’ve left out the commas.
“BODMAS is only a last resort for poor arithmetical grammar.”
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A fourth commented: “29. You always do multiplication/division before adding or subtracting.”
So what answer did you get? Let us know in the comments section below…
In other news, Martin recently warned Brits of roam data charges as EE is reintroducing the fees abroad.
Replying to a user on Twitter, he said more telecom companies could follow in reintroducing the fees for holidaymakers in Europe.
It follows after EE confirmed it would bring in a flat fee of £2 per day for customers to use their phones in 47 countries.