For the life of me, I do not understand what happened to the distributive method of resolving parentheses. While I find the article at the top of this page to be very informative, and it does mention the distributive method, it fails to answer why so many people seem to have forgotten about it! I have had multiple people tell me it is only used when you have variables. This makes no sense as the equation comes out differently with variables versus constants. Whether it has constants or variables, the parentheses need to be expanded first, and this is only done with one method: (2*2)+(2*1)=6, then you can divide this resultant into 6.