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Why This Matters for Nursing: When calculating medication doses, you often have multiple steps. Doing operations in the wrong order gives wrong answers—and in healthcare, wrong answers can be dangerous.
PEMDAS tells you the order to perform mathematical operations:
| Letter | Stands For | Examples |
|---|---|---|
| P | Parentheses | (2 + 3) |
| E | Exponents | 3² |
| M | Multiplication | 4 × 5 |
| D | Division | 20 ÷ 4 |
| A | Addition | 6 + 7 |
| S | Subtraction | 10 - 3 |
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