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Mathematics in Business and Economics

Operations

• Addition - The sum of two numbers.
• Subtraction - The difference between two numbers.
• Multiplication - The process of repeatedly adding additional numbers. 10 x 3 means adding 10 to itself three times, 5x means 5 lots of x.
• Division - The inverse of multiplication. It looks at how many times one number will go into another or how many times one number can be divided up.

Fairly obvious stuff so far. Remember with multiplication that the sign 'X' is most recognisable but in many cases the 'X' is not written in and instead '.' is used or nothing at all! So 5p + 3y means '5 lots of whatever number 'p' represents PLUS 3 lots of whatever 'y' represents'. Similarly 'py' means p times y (p x y).

Each of the above are called operations - they are things that you have to do to sets of numbers or expressions. When there are a number of operations to be carried out, there are rules that you should follow. These rules can be remembered easily through the acronym BODMAS. BODMAS helps you to follow through the correct order for carrying out multiple operations. It stands for:

B - Brackets - do anything within a bracket first
O - Order - do anything that is raised to a power, e.g. 4²
D - Division - carry out any division operations
M - Multiply - next do any multiplication
A - Addition - then any addition
S - Subtraction - finally subtraction

Try the following to assess your understanding of working with multiple operations:

25/5 x (3 - 1)² + 26 - 10

(The answer by the way is 36)

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