>>>

>>>-24/4(-2)
>>>

>>>Is it:
>>>

>>>-6(-2) = 12
>>>

>>>Or is it:
>>>

>>>-24/-8 = 3
>>>

>>
>>See Agnes' reply :o)
>
>This is what gets me. I've gotten different answer from technical people who are good at math. How am I supposed to help an 11-year old understand the rules? After reading all the replies, I still don't know if the answer is 12 or 3.

The rule I learned in school was "Please excuse my dear Aunt Sally," which stood for: parentheses, exponentiation, multiplication and division, addition and subtraction. IOW, absent parentheses, multiplication and division have the same precedence and occur in order from left to right. in your original example, that means you divide -24 by 4 first, then multiply by -2. Result = -12.

Tried to find a link for this, but they're all related to programming languages or applications. Doesn't the math book have this information?

Tamar