Tuesday, March 12, 2013

Discount Rates


This topic has a legendary background. In grand olden days people were using camels to carry heavy loads. When the camel is resting, a heavy load will be placed on its body to its great disliking. After all done, the master will take out a small straw from the load to the notice of the animal and will throw it away. The camel will be extremely happy that the load is much lighter now. I like to share this Discount Rate Formula with you all through my article.

In present days, the above technique is practiced by almost all sellers in the world. Even a billionaire will not accept a sale without discount. Thus, ‘discount’ is a concept that has occupied a place in math. The discount rates are normally expressed as a percentage of the original price. Thus, fundamentally, one has to know the concept of percentages to calculate discount rate. By calculating discount rate, we also come to know how to find discount.

Let us discuss the matter with some practical examples.

In a textile show room, tee shirts are tagged with labels saying that ‘Original price $15, the discount only for today is 10%’. (The today usually remains ever!). Now let us do the math exercise. With the concept on percentages, 10% means a fraction of 10/100. That is, the rate of discount is $10 for every purchase with original price of $100.In other words the rate is 0.1 times the original price. Thus, the discount on the tee shirt originally costing $15 is 0.1 times $15 which works out as $1.5. So what you finally need to pay is $15 - $1.5 = $13.5.

Understanding Intermediate Value Theorem Examples is always challenging for me but thanks to all math help websites to help me out. 

This is not the case only with show rooms or malls. Even in online transactions we come across the ‘discount rates’. The agent of the seller on chat will mention ‘today we are offering heavy discounts’. In all likelihood, the quoted sentence will be a copy paste from a prepared notepad which may be as old as Bible. In these cases they will not even tax your brain. The complete quote will be like this. ‘Original price $100, offer applicable only on this chat is $79.99 ($80 may seem to be very heavy for the customers even though the difference is just one cent!), amounting to more than 20% discount’. Well, leaving the humorous part of the story, mathematically there is no flaw in this offer. Because the amount of discount is $20.01 and when you work back for the rate of discount, it comes to 20.01%.
Basically this is the concept on discount rates.

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