Profit From Selling Chairs

Date: 9/5/96 at 20:26:32
From: Jennie Velez
Subject: Profit From Selling Chairs

A man buys 3 chairs for $50. He sells them for $24 ea. How many 
chairs must he sell to get a profit of $1320?

I always get a different answer when I multiply the amount of how 
many chairs I think he has to sell and subtract it from his profit.

Date: 9/9/96 at 22:18:41
From: Doctor Ana
Subject: Re: Profit From Selling Chairs

The easiest way to solve this problem is to figure out how much profit 
the man makes on each chair. Then we can figure out how many chairs he 
has to sell to make $1,320. 

First let's figure out how much profit the man makes on three chairs. 
The man can sell three chairs for $72 (3 chairs x $24), and since he 
bought them for $50, his profit on the three chairs is $22. 

To find out his profit on each chair, we divide $22 by 3 and get 
$7.33. 

Now that we know the profit on each chair, we can find out how many 
chairs he has to sell by dividing $1,320 by $7.33. 

The only problem with this answer is that $7.33 is an approximation, 
which means that it is close to the actual profit, but not exactly the 
same. To get an exact answer, we can divide $1,320 by 22/3. 

Now go ahead and figure out the number of chairs.

-Doctor Ana,  The Math Forum
 Check out our web site!  http://mathforum.org/dr.math/