Forgetting how to do math problems is inevitable, normal, and now thanks to one single equation, it’s also very interesting to test out. See if you’re able to solve this problem correctly or not. According to Presh Talwalkar, the man behind the YouTube channel MindYourDecisions, studies show that 60% of twenty year old Japanese adults correctly answered this exact problem. However, back in the 1980s that percentage was much higher with 90% of Japanese adults getting it correct.
The sharp drop in the number of people who are able to solve the problem is worrying and some are attributing it to modern technology. The reasoning behind the theory is that more and more people are relying on calculators, especially online ones like Google’s calculator, to solve equations. However, when they input the numbers they do so in a linear fashion and forget to apply the correct order of operations, aka PEMDAS which stands for Parentheses, Exponents, Multiplication, Division, Addition, Subtraction. Those little old rules make all the difference.
Don’t feel too down on yourself if you botch the answer and fail to answer the “simple” equation, you’re in good company. If it’s been decades since high school your memory of math lessons may be faded and over time we slowly forget and lose our recollections of many things. Even facts that seemed so important and easy to remember back then have gone from our brains. Perhaps the easiest subject to forget overall is math. Math builds on itself and all the concepts, rules, variables, and whatnot that it involves are easy to mix up or completely draw a blank on. Plus, unless your job or profession requires it, most of the stuff we learned in algebra we just don’t use in everyday life. Also, if you were never good at math back then, the odds are you won’t be good at it now. Were you able to solve it? Let us know in the comments
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