sales, commissions and salary

Question

Beverley earns 34% commission for mobile phones, and 11% commission on MP3 players. This week she earned £82.58. Her sales of mobile phones totalled £2 more than her sales of MP3 players. What was the total value of mobile phones she sold?

Answer 1

Let's call the value of the phones sold in pounds p and the value of mp3's sold in pounds m. Now we can write some equations.

The total Beverley earns is her commission from phones plus her commission from mp3's. To calculate each of those, we take the percentage of her commission times the total money made from that device.

Earned from phones = 34% of p = .34p

Earned from mp3's = 11% of m = .11m

Total earned = .34p + .11m

Since we know she earned £82.58 total, we can say:

.34p + .11m = 82.58

We also know that the sales of phones was £2 more than mp3's:

m + 2 = p

Now we can substitute (m + 2) for p in the other equation and solve for m:

.34(m + 2) + .11m = 82.58

.34m + .68 + .11m = 82.58

.45m = 81.90

m = 182

The sales of mp3's totaled £182. We can now get p:

(182) + 2 = p

p = 184

The sales of phones totaled £184.

To double-check, we can put both values into the first equation:

.34(184) + .11(182) = 62.56 + 20.02 = 82.58