Question

A washing machine has a price of £260. In a sale its price is reduced by £39. How do you write the reduction as a percentage of the price?

Answer 1

Hint: First we will write the selling price and the cost price of the object that the question has described, after we have taken out the selling and the cost price of the object we will be using the percentage formula to find out the reduction percentage in price.

Complete step-by-step solution:
The cost price is the price in which the dealer bought the object which in the question is stated as £260, so we can say that the cost price of the object is £260, cost price(CP) = £260
Now the next thing that has been defined is that there is a sale in which the price of the object is reduced by £39, so we can say that the selling price of the object is £39 less than the cost price which gives us, selling price as £260- £39 i.e.
\[\begin{align}
  & \text{Selling price }\left( \text{SP} \right)\text{ }=\text{ }\text{£}260-\text{£}39 \\
 & \Rightarrow \text{Selling price }\left( \text{SP} \right)\text{ }=\text{ }\text{£}221 \\
\end{align}\]
So from above we can say that the selling price is £221
We can clearly say that cost price (CP) is more than selling price (SP) from which we can say that there is a reduction in amount from the percentage formula which can be stated as:
\[\text{Reduction percentage = }\left( \dfrac{\text{CP-SP}}{\text{SP}} \right)\left( 100 \right)\]
Now we will be substituting all the values in the above percentage equation from which we get:
 $\text{Reduction percentage = }\left( \dfrac{260-221}{260} \right)\left( 100 \right) $
 $ \Rightarrow \text{ Reduction percentage = }\left( \dfrac{39}{260} \right)\left( 100 \right)$
 $ \Rightarrow \text{Reduction percentage = }15 $
Now from the above part we can clearly say that the reduction percentage is 15%.

Note: The basic mistake that happens here is to what the Selling price is supposed to be, in the above equation we can see that the price was reduced by so we subtracted the value given from the cost price. But if it was given that the price is reduced to we would have directly taken that value to be our selling price.