And if not, you should go back to school.

Cause your teachers were dumb.
As I've said before, here's where people get messed up. You do multiplication and division left to right, but the brackets/parens before that, so (1+2) first, giving you 6/2*(3). going left to right, that's 6/2 then that * 3, or 3 * 3 = 9.

Wolfram knows all.


I do seem to recall a lot of people getting confused by PEMDAS, myself included.

P|E|MD|AS
Do every || from left to right, from left to right. Thus, P comes before E, and you do M and D at the same time, from left to right.

The answer depends on whether you choose to count 2(1+2) as a single expression - that is to say, (1+2) with a coefficient of 2 - or if you count it as separate. The question leaves this ambiguous due to there not being clear spacing.

(6/2) (1 + 2) is the Mathematica form, which makes it all the more clear the correct method of solving this.

The lesson here is to always use a lot of parentheses and brackets.