Order of operations example

We're asked to simplify 8 plus 5 times 4 minus, and then in parentheses, 6 plus 10 divided by 2 plus 44. Whenever you see some type of crazy expression like this where you have parentheses and addition and subtraction and division, you always want to keep the order of operations in mind. Let me write them down over here. So when you're doing order of operations, or really when you're evaluating any expression, you should have this in the front of your brain that the top priority goes to parentheses. And those are these little brackets over here, or however you want to call them. Those are the parentheses right there. That gets top priority. Then after that, you want to worry about exponents. There are no exponents in this expression, but I'll just write it down just for future reference: exponents. One way I like to think about it is parentheses always takes top priority, but then after that, we go in descending order, or I guess we should say in-- well, yeah, in descending order of how fast that computation is. When I say fast, how fast it grows. When I take something to an exponent, when I'm taking something to a power, it grows really fast. Then it grows a little bit slower or shrinks a little bit slower if I multiply or divide, so that comes next: multiply or divide. Multiplication and division comes next, and then last of all comes addition and subtraction. So these are kind of the slowest operations. This is a little bit faster. This is the fastest operation. And then the parentheses, just no matter what, always take priority. So let's apply it over here. Let me rewrite this whole expression. So it's 8 plus 5 times 4 minus, in parentheses, 6 plus 10 divided by 2 plus 44. So we're going to want to do the parentheses first. We have parentheses there and there. Now this parentheses is pretty straightforward. Well, inside the parentheses is already evaluated, so we could really just view this as 5 times 4. So let's just evaluate that right from the get go. So this is going to result in 8 plus-- and really, when you're evaluating the parentheses, if your evaluate this parentheses, you literally just get 5, and you evaluate that parentheses, you literally just get 4, and then they're next to each other, so you multiply them. So 5 times 4 is 20 minus-- let me stay consistent with the colors. Now let me write the next parenthesis right there, and then inside of it, we'd evaluate this first. Let me close the parenthesis right there. And then we have plus 44. So what is this thing right here evaluate to, this thing inside the parentheses? Well, you might be tempted to say, well, let me just go left to right. 6 plus 10 is 16 and then divide by 2 and you would get 8. But remember: order of operations. Division takes priority over addition, so you actually want to do the division first, and we could actually write it here like this. You could imagine putting some more parentheses. Let me do it in that same purple. You could imagine putting some more parentheses right here to really emphasize the fact that you're going to do the division first. So 10 divided by 2 is 5, so this will result in 6, plus 10 divided by 2, is 5. 6 plus 5. Well, we still have to evaluate this parentheses, so this results-- what's 6 plus 5? Well, that's 11. So we're left with the 20-- let me write it all down again. We're left with 8 plus 20 minus 6 plus 5, which is 11, plus 44. And now that we have everything at this level of operations, we can just go left to right. So 8 plus 20 is 28, so you can view this as 28 minus 11 plus 44. 28 minus 11-- 28 minus 10 would be 18, so this is going to be 17. It's going to be 17 plus 44. And then 17 plus 44-- I'll scroll down a little bit. 7 plus 44 would be 51, so this is going to be 61. So this is going to be equal to 61. And we're done!