There could be two right answers depending on your assumptions - is operation precedence honored or do you want to go left to right? But in any case I am curious how you would get a 42 out of that... anyone?? Unless it's a HHGG reference of course. (No panic here.)
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-x16wda
Well, I figured it was just a stupid "teaser" puzzle - an elementary one that is deliberately ambiguous - to generate clicks to advisoruncle.com, which looks like a recruitment agency, or something. Thus getting the answer "right" was likely to be largely irrelevant, and so no particular answer will necessarily be "right".
The caption says "...ANSWER IT", presumably signifying that it is in an IT-related context, so I would presume that, for computation, the operation precedence rule would be followed - and any calculator would be able to confirm the same solution without needing brackets around the * and / operations. Oddly, the HP calculator might be an exception.
If you went step-by-step from L to R (which was what I did first, just to see) then 6-1*0+2/2= can give "1".
However, elementary maths and any calculator that is programmed to correctly obey the standard computational rules would give "7", so I reckoned that, from the context of IT, "7" would be the "correct" answer. Mind you, I didn't bother working it from R to L...
You are probably right about the HHGG reference to 42, which I recall was the answer to "Life, The Universe, Everything", or words to that effect. I was never sure but I suspected that Douglas Adams chose 42 for the reason that not only is it the magic constant of the smallest magic cube, composed with numbers 1 to 27, but also (and perhaps more importantly) it is kind of - or part of - "the answer to everything", being the 5th Catalan number, which numbers occur especially in combinatorial problems, where the answers to many/most of them is the sequence of the Catalan numbers. But that's just a guess.
