Why does the question consider parenthesis?

[user342]

Hi all. I have started going through the I’m Overwhelmed study plan and in Part 1 under QUANT he suggested at the end of his Operations with negatives video that any negative number with any number exponent (even or odd) is always negative unless the negative number is inside a parenthesis and the exponent is outside the parenthesis.

My query here is why does the question automatically assume that ‘negative number with an even/odd exponent’ means that the negative number is surrounded by parenthesis? Shouldn’t the question be more explicit?

[Leaderboard]

Because the alternative, i.e, -(x^a) would be something like “the negative of a positive number with an even exponent”. In other words, the bracketing is implied in the original problem.