Inactive Tutor answered • 12/17/12
Tutor
New to Wyzant
In this problem the key idea you have to understand is order of operations. Let's review: Anything in parenthesis is done first. Multiplication and division is done before addition and subtraction. With these two rules we can do this problem. x = 52/17 + 5(7+9). First we see that there areparenthesis so we do this operation first and simplify the equation to x = 52/17 + 5(16). We then do the multiplication and division operations to simplify x = 52/17 + 80 = 83.06 (rounding to the nearest hundreth). If the problem would have read x = 52/(17+5(7+9)) this would have simplified to x = 52/(17+80) = 52/97 = .536.
