Order of Operations and Your Calculator
There are two ways to deal with the order of operations while using a calculator:
- Work out operations one by one on your calculator while keeping track of the entire equation on paper. This is a slow but accurate process.
- If you have a graphing calculator, you can type the whole expression into your calculator. This method will be faster, but can cause careless errors.
If you want to type full expressions into your graphing calculator, you must be familiar with how your calculator works. You can’t enter fractions and exponents into your calculator the way they appear on paper. Instead, you have to be sure to recognize and preserve the order of operations. Practice with the following expression:
If you enter this into a graphing calculator, it should look like this:
