Math is a tricky subject that many of us have trouble mastering in school. Once we become adults, most of us don’t find ourselves having to do more than just basic math very often, and we forget some of the math lessons in school that we learned so many years ago.

The math problem below may look straightforward, and it probably is for the average fifth grader. Adults, however, are having trouble solving this on the first try after it started making the rounds on the internet. In fact, a Japanese study carried out by college researchers found that just 60 percent of the engineers who tried to solve this problem were able to do so correctly.

It should be noted that these engineers were all in their twenties, so all of us folks older than that will likely have even more trouble with this!

Here’s the equation: 9 – 3 ÷ 1/3 + 1 = ?

Try to solve it yourself before reading any further!

If you think back to the math skills you learned in school, you might remember PEMDAS, an acronym that means “parenthesis, exponents, multiplication, division, addition, subtraction,” which is known for being the order of operations to solve equations like this one.

Most people look at this math problem and decide that the answer is 9, but they are wrong. The mistake that they are making is that they are forgetting to isolate the division part of the problem as well as tend to add, then subtract, as the order of operations would have them believe.

TipHero.com explained how best to solve this equation:

“What you want to do here is start over by tackling 3 ÷ 1/3 first, and no, you’re not supposed to multiply here. Divide! Hint: 3 divided by 1/3 is actually 9. Take it from there. Using a calculator, it’s likely that it will read that relationship between 3 and 1/3 as a funky way to arrive at 1 before working out the rest of the equation. If you did that too, we understand how you arrived at your final answer.”

“Now, the PEMDAS rules call for you to solve all addition and subtraction problems in the order they appear. So instead of adding first, you will solve the equation from left to right,” Readers Digest adds.

Did you have any trouble solving this? Let us know in the comments section.