Molly Draper(MARION, Ohio) — Police across the country are used to solving puzzles, but one Ohio police department recently got a plea for help from a local girl seeking to solve a puzzle of a more mathematical bent.
Ten-year-old Lena Draper, 10, decided she needed some help with her fifth-grade math homework, so she took to the Marion, Ohio, Police Department’s Facebook page on Friday and messaged them a few problems that she felt needed answering.
The police department came to her rescue, messaging the little girl back after she posted the math problem, (8 + 29) X 15. The police department responded with “do the numbers in the parenthesis first so in essence it would be 37 X 15.”
Lena followed up with another problem: “(90+27)+(29+15)x2”
To which the police department replied: “Take the answer from the first parenthesis plus the answer from the second parenthesis and multiply that answer by two.”
Though they were going above and beyond their duties, in a math faux pas, the answer given to Lena ended up being incorrect, as pointed out by a friend of Lena’s mother. (The correct answer is to add the numbers in the second parenthesis and multiply only that by two, and then add it to the numbers in the first parenthesis.)
Lena’s mom, Molly Draper, said she was tickled that the local police department tried to help her daughter with her homework. “I didn’t believe her and asked for a screenshot. I thought it was pretty funny. And I love that they went ahead with it,” she told ABC News.
In response to the incident, the Marion Police Department posted on its Facebook page that it is a full-service police department that makes every emergency a cause to be answered.
When asked if Lena’s math problem ever got answered correctly, her mom said, “I hope so. But we’ll see when she gets her paper back.”
For those in need of math equation help, remember the acronym, PEMDAS, which stands for parentheses, exponents, multiplication, division, addition and subtraction — the order in which mathematical operations should be performed in an equation.
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