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Math Fail

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1. Joshua Zucker August 23, 2010 at 5:47 pm

   On the Google one, I can get the rounding error but not the mysterious replacement of 2s with 5s?

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2. Bryan Lee Williams August 24, 2010 at 9:21 am

   I put into Google:
   200000000000002-200000000000001
   and got
   200 000 000 000 002 – 200 000 000 000 001 = 1
   That Yahoo question just makes me pity those people.

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3. Joshua Zucker August 25, 2010 at 3:32 pm

   http://www.google.com/search?sourceid=chrome&ie=UTF-8&q=2000000000000000000002-2000000000000000000001 works to give 0 instead of 1. You just need enough 0s.
   The Yahoo one is fine, in the sense that order of operations is arbitrary, but not fine in the sense that someone could be a math grad student and not have learned that. Also the “i’ve been researching for two days” makes it a lot more pitiable.

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4. Al August 29, 2010 at 2:41 am

   The first one is not a fail, it’s a genuine question; the answer really is 14 unless you put brackets around the 2+3 bit. Then it’s 20. That had me confused for ages as well until I learnt what BODMAS meant.

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5. CJ September 28, 2010 at 10:57 pm

   and the commonsense fail goes to Al : P

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6. Johnny November 22, 2010 at 9:33 pm

   Order of operations dictates that multiplication is done first, brackets or not – the correct answer is 14.

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