The markup on a digital camera is 125%. The wholesale price of the digital camera is $97. what is the retail price?

Question

find the percent discount or the percent markup and the retail price

Answer 1

A percent MARK-UP is added on to the original (WHOLESALE) price (which is what the store owner PAID for the product) and then that new price (wholesale + markup) is the RETAIL price that the store's customer pays for the product.

In this problem, the markup is 125% of the wholesale, or original, price. 

If the store owner did not want to make any profit at all, he would not mark it up at all and he would thus sell it for 100% of the original price. But that would be silly, because then he would not make any money!

So he sells it for 125% of the original wholesale price.  

Let's break that down to see to what 125% really means... 125 PER CENT

"125" means 125. "Per" means "divided by" and "cent" is the Latin word for 100. So 125% is 125/100! The new price is 125%  "OF" the old price. "Of" always means multiply. So now we have the words "125% of the old price", which translates in math to: 125/100 x 97.

Or since it is fractions, we can say 125/100 x 97/1 and we multiply the numerators (top) numbers and denominators (bottom) number. 

125 x 97 = 12,125 and 1 x 100 = 100. Therefore, we have a new fraction of 12,125/100.  That is the same thing as 12,125 divided by 100, and so we end up with the RETAIL price of $121.25! (When dividing by 100, remember we just move the decimal point over to the left two spaces!)

 

And voilà! There you have it! The new price is $121.25 which is a 25% markup over the old price of $97.00.  (The markup itself is 25% but when we multiply we need to remmebr the 100% + the 25% additional, so we use 125%. You could also do the same problem in two steps. First take 25% of 97 (which is $24.25) and then add that amount to $97.00 to get the new price of $121.25.

And one final shortcut that you could have used to solve the original problem would be to multiply $97 by 1.25 since 125% or 125/100 = 1.25 in decimal format.  That would take you right to $121.25!

Hope that helps!

Kind regards,

Donna K :-)