How do you solve tax and tip?

Tax: To find tax, multiply the tax rate by the taxable amount (income, property value, etc.) Tip: To find the tip, multiply the rate by the selling price .

How to do sales tax math?

What is the sales tax formula? Sales tax rate = Sales tax percent / 100. Sales tax = List price x Sales tax rate.

What is the formula for tip calculator?

Figuring out the tip If your total bill is $200 and you want to tip 15%, work out the tip by multiplying the total bill by 0.15 . You can then add this amount to your bill when it comes to pay. Simple. Or alternatively, you can multiply the bill excluding service by 1.15 (assuming you want to leave that same 15% tip).

How do you teach sales tax?

Lesson Summary Sales tax is a fee that is added to the price of some items that you buy. To calculate it, you change the sales tax percentage into a decimal and multiply the price of the item by the amount of sales tax . To figure out the total cost of the item, add the sales tax to the original price of the item.

What is tax examples math?

Example: Sales Tax The sales tax rate in a city is 9.3%. How much sales tax will you pay on a $140 purchase? The sales tax will be 9.3% of $140. To compute this, we multiply $140 by the percent written as a decimal: $140(0.093) = $13.02.

What is the easiest way to calculate income tax?

To calculate income tax, you add all forms of taxable income earned in a tax year. Next, find your adjusted gross income. Then, subtract any eligible deductions from your adjusted gross income .

Do you tip on the subtotal or total?

Whichever way you lean, money isn't really a matter of opinion when exchanging goods and services. The consensus is that you should probably be tipping on the total, but there are arguments in favor of tipping on the subtotal as well.

How do I subtract 20% tax?

Removing VAT If you want to remove the VAT from a figure, you need to take the original figure and divide that by 100 and the VAT percentage combined. (So for a UK VAT of 20%, it would be 120). You then multiply the result by 100. We divided that amount by 120 and then multiply the result by 100.

Teaching Tax, Tips, Discounts, and Interest using I Can Statements

Teaching about tax, tip, discounts and interest is a fun, real world topic. As I was teaching it I noticed that my 7th graders don’t actually know much about spending money. Their money spending experience is very limited and that led to some pretty awesome conversations. Like most topics, they entered the learning as essentially blank canvases. I love topics like this because they don’t have a whole lot of misconceptions when we start learning. So, to get started with planning this unit, I first chunked out the unit by writing our learning goals as “I Can” statements. These become the backbone of my lesson planning and guide us through the lesson and practice (check out 8 Tax, Tips, and Discounts Activities).

Everything starts with the answer to the question, “What do I want my students to be able to know and do?” Below I will share how I used “I Can” statements to chunk out the learning for working with tax, tips, and discounts.

What I want my students to be able to do with tax, tips, and discounts

As you can see, this concept ends in students being able to apply math skills to real world story problems. They have to be able to find whether there is an increase or a decrease and then do something with that information. Students seem to struggle the most with the application portion of this topic, so that is the area that requires a lot of focus.

One challenge for this unit is that it was my first time teachingthis topic from start to finish. It’s something that comes extremely easy to me and I can do all the work in my head. Sometimes when you know the topic too well you have what is known as the “curse of knowledge“. Unfortunately, I definitely had this the first time I taught this topic. I made way too many assumptions about what students understood. The unit didn’t go well, so I had to go back to the beginning and reteach it to the class. The second time around my students really did well. I’m going to share what I did the second time that was super successful.

I can statements

When I sit down to plan a unit I chunk out the lessons through writing “I Can” statements. You can read more about this process inthis post. Here are the I can statements that I had my students write in their notebooks for tax, tips, and discounts.

I can solve for x in a proportion.

Solving for x in a proportion is a topic that students have learned previously in the year. Typically, prior to teaching about tax, tips and discounts students have already done a lot of cyclical review with proportions because it’s at the core of many of the other objectives for the year in 7th grade. This I can statement specifically focuses on solving for x in a proportion. This is a concept that is great to review in an anticipatory set to make sure that students can do this with automaticity. If they can’t do this, then they’ll be stuck later on in the unit.

I can set-up a proportion to find the value of a proportional tax, a tip, or a discount.

This was a new way of finding tax or tip for me, but it worked so well for my students because they have a deep background in setting up and solving proportions. I was trying to teach them how I do it in my head. Something that I have been doing for years and don’t have to think about. I found out really quickly that this was beyond their zone of proximal development, if you will.

Here’s how we set up the proportion. We always put the percent first, which is the number per 100. Then, we write an equals sign and the other fraction will always have x as a numerator and the amount we are finding the percent of will be the denominator. It can be tempting to teach multiple ways of doing it, but if it’s new to students, less is more.

Someday students will be ready for learning a variety of ways to do it, but for now one way that makes sense to them is enough. Especially considering that we have such a short amount of time to learn this topic.

I can identify if the situation represents an increase or a decrease.

Identifying whether a situation represents an increase or a decrease is a small objective, but important nonetheless. I realized that 7th grades don’t have a huge background with taxes and tips. They’re not usually the ones footing the bill at dinner. Also, I work at a low income school and many of the kids don’t go to a lot of restaurants where you pay a tip. We had to spend some time practicing which situations are markups and which ones were markdowns.

I can read and annotate a story problem related to tax, tips, or discounts and identify which operations are happening.

Reading and annotating story problems is an aspect of problem solving that we are emphasizing at my school this year. We need to give students more experience and strategies for reading and understanding problems. One way to do this is for students to annotate problems. We use a strategy called C.U.B.E.S. This stands for:

Circle the key numbers
Underline the question
Box any math action words
Eliminate information that is not needed
Solve

There are other ways to do look at story problems, but if you don’t already have a thinking strategy that you use with students, I’d recommend CUBES. I think the most important thing is to have a way of reading problems and use it consistently. You just can’t assume already know how to read and understand problems. And if they can’t do it, then that’s just what we have to teach them.

I can find a total in a story problem related to tax, tips, and discounts.

This is the culmination of all the other work. In this part students have to put it all together. When students have a solid footing with the other parts, this part comes together rather easily. Here students solve story problems which can come in different levels of difficulty. They may just have to find the tax and add it to the original price. Or they may have to add more than one markup or markdown. Also, you might want to have students just spend time before diving in to a problem identifying if they’re going to add or subtract. Sometimes, they may have to use other operations too.

Misconceptions about taxes, tips, and discounts

Finally, the biggest misconception that I saw with my students is that they’re used to thinking of going down as bad, so they think that tax goes down. I have one students in particular who would argue with me on almost every problem about why we have to subtract a discount. She really just wanted to add the discount because she felt like she was getting extra money with a discount. I never expected this misconception, but for some of my students it was pretty deep.

Take-Aways and Getting Started

Chunking the learning through I can statements can help you to go in a logical order that will lead to deep understanding for your students. The I can statements that I have are not the only way that this can be taught. You can adapt them for your students and your standards. I love having students write them in their interactive notebooks and reflecting on them throughout the unit. It helps students to be aware of what they learning whilehelping me keep them on a good path. Be sure to grab the whole pack of 7th grade I Can statements ready for you get started with right away.

If you’re interested in a resource that progresses in an order like the one described above, check out our task cards for taxes, tips, and discounts.

Teaching Tax, Tips, Discounts, and Interest using I Can Statements - Idea Galaxy (2024)