A bicycle has a listed price of $591.98 before tax. If the sales tax rate is 8.75% , find the total cost of the bicycle with sales tax included. Round your answer to the nearest cent, as necessary.

Question

A bicycle has a listed price of $591.98

 before tax. If the sales tax rate is 8.75%

, find the total cost of the bicycle with sales tax included.Round your answer to the nearest cent, as necessary.

Answer 1

There are two ways to solve this problem! The more complicated way is to first find the sales tax on its own. We must convert the percentage to a decimal by dividing by 100.

8.75 / 100 = .0875. The total sales tax is this decimal multiplied by the listed price of the item, or .0875 * 591.98, which is 51.79825, or $51.80 rounded to the nearest cent. The total cost of the bicycle with sales tax included is the listed price of the item plus this amount, or $591.98 + $51.80. The total is $643.78.

The simplified trick to find the answer of this question is to multiply not by 8.75% and then add, but to multiply by 108.75% and get your answer immediately. We do this because we want to add the price of the item, or 100% of the listed price, with the 8.75% sales tax. But instead of finding the sales tax on its own first, we can just add the two percentages in the beginning to get 108.75%. We take the decimal of that, or 1.0875, and multiply it by the listed price of 591.98, and get the same answer of $643.78!