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Welcome to our Math lesson on Expressions Containing Brackets. PEMDAS Rule, this is the fifth lesson of our suite of math lessons covering the topic of Order of Operations and PEMDAS Rule, you can find links to the other lessons within this tutorial and access additional Math learning resources below this lesson.
Brackets are used in an arithmetic expression to highlight the part of expression enclosed inside them, i.e. to indicate the part of expression that is to be solved first, regardless of the operations involved. In this case, we forget the rest and focus only in what is inside brackets. After removing brackets, then we continue with the rest of expression as explained earlier.
Remembering the order of operations in expressions containing all operations mentioned above as well as brackets is easier when you use the PEMDAS Rule. PEMDAS is the acronym made by using the first letter of the rules discussed so far. We have
Calculate the value of the following expression
Despite the fact that we have exponents outside brackets (which have a higher order of priority than all the other operations) and only multiplication and subtraction inside them, we begin from the part enclosed inside brackets. Here, we apply the same rules discussed earlier (multiplication first, then subtraction). We have
Now that brackets are gone, we continue with the rest of operations (now we have EMDAS, not PEMDAS, as parenthesis are not present anymore in the expression). Therefore, we have to find the value of terms containing exponents before continuing with the rest. We have
Now, it is better to calculate 54 ÷ 9 as there are two consecutive operations of the same order of priority in that place, and if we try to solve them simultaneously, this may create confusion. We have
Now, we can do the two multiplications simultaneously as they are not consecutive. We have
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