Real simple questions that my son can't do and neither can I! I was never any good at fractions at school and that was a long time ago.
Two questions.
1. 1 gallon = 4.5 litres How many gallons in a litre, write answer as a fraction. I got 1/4.5?
2. Choccy bars are 19p cost price. Samson makes 4p profit on every bar he resells. Write his profit as a fraction of the cost of each bar.
Its driving me mad, let alone my son!

2/9

4/23

and I left school 32 years ago and I am full of beery goodness

fractions have to be written as integers (whole numbers), so gallons in litres = 2/9

choccy bar question. profit = 4/23. because 23 is a prime number, this is the lowest fraction it can be written as.

i have been drinking, so sorry if the above are wrong STW massive.

1. Your first answer is technically correct but you can't really combine fractions and decimals like that, you need to multiple the top and bottom of the fraction to get rid of the decimal so multiply top and bottom by two = 2/9

2. Strange wording on this one, I might have this entirely wrong but… The bars cost 19 for samson to buy, he adds 4p on and then sells them so his profit is 4/23

quicklly edited to rearrange last typo

Saladdodger – same answer but you were faster! I bow to your superior intellect. Mind you I am pissed.

Actually, looks like we're all pissed!

I did think fractions had to be whole numbers but wasn't 100% sure.
But maybe the answer to question 2 is 4/19 though? The question asks for profit of the cost of each bar. Would that be cost price or sale price? Not very well worded I'm afraid.

cost price is effectively the cost to the buyer (e.g. middle man). sale price is the cost to the consumer (e.g. customer). therefore answer should be 4/23 if it is worder as cost price. if it is worded as the sale price is 19p and he takes 4 p profit then it would be 4/19. again, all depends on the wording, but as written above i would assume it is cost price, and the answer is 4/23

i make the answer to the second question 4/19 he makes 4p profit for every 19p invested. I will not be going into partnership with any of you guys 😆

GJP – Member
i make the answer to the second question 4/19 he makes 4p profit for every 19p invested

Write his profit as a fraction of the cost of each bar.

Agreed

It's a wording thing and all looks very similar to the maths homework my son used to be set when he was younger. I bet half the kids got it wrong not because they didn't understand how to do it but because the wording was either deliberately or accidentally designed to confuse. Which is just bloody stupid.

Write his profit as a fraction of the cost of each bar.

Agreed

Cost to who? Samson or his customers?

Second one is badly worded. 19p cost price. Is that cost to the customer or cost to the retailer?

If the cost is the customers price, then the profit is 4/19
If the cost is the retailers buy-in price, then the final price of the bar is 23p so the profit is 4/23.

I would agree that the second question is badly worded, but in my mind the answer is either 4/19 as per my original post or 4/15.

Einstein may have proved that you can not travel faster than the speed of light but to the very best of my knowledge he never proved you could not make more than 100% profit.

If I buy something for X (my cost price), add an amount Y to provide a consumer selling price of X+Y, then other peoples posts above give profit of Y/(X+Y). This is always less than 1 or 100% and is only asymtopic (sp?) to 1 or 100% as Y approaches infinity. So it would be impossible to ever make more than 100% profit!

This is obviously B*****ks

I'm gonna talk myself through this one:

You buy a choc bar at 19p (total so far, 19)
You add 4p profit. (total so far, 23p)

Write the profit as a fraction of the whole bar cost. Well if the whole bar costs 23p and the profit is 4 of those pennies, the profit is 4/23, or about 17%.

If the cost of the bar to the customer is 19p, and he makes 4 p, then the fraction of the cost that's profit is 4/19ths. or about 22%.

It's asking what percentage of the final cost is made up of profit. If you have near infinite profit margin you have near 100% of the price being profit. It's not asking what is the ratio of profit to cost.

There you go curly, get your lad to put that as the answer. 😉

I'd say GJP is correct in his thinking, that unless you take the profit and divide it by the cost to the supplier, then you will never be able to get a profit of 100% or over…

So 4/19.

gold star to GJP……top of the class!

If you use some different numbers to make it easier to conceptualise, say chocy bars cost 100 pence to buy in at cost price, sold for 150 p, profit is obviously 50p, so 50%, or 1/2. To say the profit from that is 50/150, or 1/3, doesn't make any sense. So the answer is 4/19 in the example above.

No, the question asks you to write the profit as a fraction of the cost of the bar

If the bar costs 19p and you add 4p profit, you have 4/23rd of the price as profit. If you have the cost as 19 and 19,000p profit, you might have a 1000x profit markup, but as a fraction of the cost of the bar you have 19000/19019, or 99.9% of the cost of the bar is profit.

This is why I say the question is badly worded. It's like when the papers ask what amount of the price of fuel is tax, you get a value of 80% or so (120 with 96p tax, not 96/24 = 400%).

Far Far to heavy for me at this time of night.

night night lads and ladies

Coffeeking – I agree the question is very badly worded. The profit margin is most definitely 4/19 whereas the profit as a percentage of gross turnover is 4/23. Understanding the frame of reference is very important which is highlighted as you say correctly by your fuel example.

I have just has a colleague rejoin my team full time 5 days a week after working 4 days a week for several months. He said how please he was to have a 20% pay rise. I told him he had been diddled and should have been given a 25% pay rise.

Well, I guess it depends on your viewpoint… that of the person selling the bar, or the person buying the bar, in which case both answers are correct depending on which way you are looking at it.

The person selling the bar wants to know what profit he is making on each sale… and will want that as a fraction of his costs. (4/19)

The person buying the bar wants to know what fraction of the price to him is going to the person selling it as profit. (4/23)

Everyone agree now?

:o)

Dam I keep method in decimals and then convert that into fractions.

Like 0.2 is 1/5th.

Thing is there are more than one answer and a math teacher should give you marks but I bet they have only one bloody answer!

I worked my decimals into funnywicks answer and got the same as you lot.

Agreed Funkynick and thanks everyone else.

hhhmmm. Fair point coffeeking, nicely argued. Given the wording of the question, i'm coming round to the view that both answers can be seen as correct given that the reference point of cost, to either our hero Samson or to the buyer, isn't explicitly stated. Occupied a few minds for a while though, so all good 🙂

little samson needs to be shot before we end up with another tosser like richard bloody branson the entrepreneurial prick!

Right you lot are getting profit margin confused with markup.

The question though is clearly out of date by about 20 years. You'd never get a chocolate bar for 23p now.

Question 2 – 4/19

You lot are trying too hard.
The only cost we know is 19p

We don't know that he sells them for 23p. That's an assumption. He might be selling them for £1.50 then taking into account his overheads…staff wages, rates, electric bill, and arriving at a profit of 4p.

The only givens are 4p and 19p. See wot I mean?

SB

I found this with my son's maths homework, it is so poorly written and badly thought out that the questions become difficult. I nearly got in an argument with his maths teacher who was clearly worse at maths than me (A level Pure maths, 'u' grade 1981 plus a sad addiction to popular science books since then)

Yup it's not asking for a business model all it is saying is it cost 19p for a bar of chocolate and he gets 4p back as profit so it's 4/19.

They didn't ask how much it would be with VAT and can he claim it back or the % he makes from each one and how that works out to theory of relativity.

I don't believe that profit (4p) as a percentage / fraction of cost of sales (the cost of the bar 19p) is a recognised measure of profitability anywhere.

Tell him to go back to his teacher and ask him why he's being asked to calculate such nonsense?

4/19

It's not a question in business studies / an MBA. The question didn't ask for a discussion on whether a retailer can make >100% profit on his selling price (you can if your costs are <0, and that can happen too*). It asked for the profit (4p) as a fraction of his cost (19p)

There's no reason why you can't have a percentage that is greater than 100%, it is simply a means of referencing the denominator back to 100. What is the current rate of inflation in Zimbabwe? Equally, you can easily make back more than your cost price again and therefore show a profit as a % of your cost that is >100. As long as the denominator is defined ("as a fraction of the COST of each bar") just do as it says.

* Cost <0. I work for a Chemical Co and one of our US plants has a waste stream that previously we had to pay to remediate and dispose. ie: at a cost to us. Now we have someone who is prepared to buy it to use as a N source for fertiliser. So our cost is effectively less than zero in that it costs nothing to make (it's a waste stream) and in fact we're a few $/tonne better off because we're not paying a waste company. Hence cost / tonne is (minus whatever that cost is)

[edit] I agree it would be an ODD way to define profit if you were being asked to do it using normal business rules, but that's not what it asked]