Originally Posted by WarChild

Again, it's an argument of explicit versus implicit multiplication. Something that's not a steadfast rule. The point of the troll is that the original equation is written amigiously.

To write it properly to be solved as 288 it should indeed be written as:

(48÷2)(9+3)=X

By the same token to be solved as 2 it should be written as:

48/(2(9+3))

OR

48
-------
2(9+3)

Were it written in this fashion we could easily agree on the answer. It's not though, so there's no way that applying the standard order of operations to this can be considered "wrong".