One of the Facebook Questions currently going viral is this one.
1+1+1+1+1+1+1+1+1+1-1+1+1+1+1+1+1×0 =?
As of noon PST on Tuesday June 14, the correct answer was NOt the most popular answer.
781,143 people believe the expression is equal to 0.
[These people are forgetting their order of operations. The 0 is multiplied by the final 1 and this takes place before any addition or subtraction.]
185,218 people belive the expression is equal to 16.
[These people are simply being careless and not noticing that there is a minus sign mixed in with the addition signs.]
34,805 people believe the expression is equal to 17.
[We can only assume these people miscounted the number of ones or counted all the digits. Either way, the answer is wrong.]
Only 663,922 people (barely 40% of the sample) would make their math teachers proud because they recognize the correct answer to be 14.
The most troubling part to us is the fact that the question is treated as an opinion problem as opposed to having a single correct answer.