Why do Canadians have to pass a math test to win a contest?

[Counda]

Yea... When I won something off the McDonalds Monopoly thing I had to answer a similar question to claim my free chicken burger... Their extremely easy, but annoying... Grr :

 

[eobard]

There was a time when it was a non-secret that the answer was always 10. A conspiracy if you will to make sure everyone who entered any contest in Canada could win. That no longer holds true though. I once saw a documentary about a mathematician who entered a contest back in that era. In that contest if the question was processed linearly, left to right, the answer came out to 10, but if the rules of BODMAS/BEDMAS (or whatever your math teacher called it) were used the answer came out to something like 99.999999999999995. This mathematician arranged to be at the location when the drum full of entries was opened to see if the entry pulled had the right math to it. The contest holders figured something was up so they set their legal department to it and realized that they couldn't call anyone a winner who didn't have the obscure number of 99.9999999999999995 so as not to **** off the regular contestants they had to give away two prizes, one to the first person who's ticket they pulled had the answer of 10 and a second (I think it was a car) to the mathematician, who was the only one who followed the order of operations rules. Somtimes it pays to be good at math.