How much would Jodie earn?

Jodie works for a bookshop, she is paid £6.50 an hour plus 5% of the cost of each book she sells. On Saturday she worked for 3 hours and sold £220 worth of books. How much did she earn on saturday?

Here we need to look at the two parts of the question separately before we put them together at the end.

So first lets see how much she earns from her wages, to work this out we need to do £6.50 multiplied by 3 (the number of hours she worked). You can do this multiplication a number of ways but the easiest is to do 6x3=18 first and then 0.5x3=1.5, and add the two together, to get 6.50x3=18+1.50=£19.50.

The next part of the question is to work out is how much Jodie gets from selling £220 worth of books, ie what 5% of 220 is. To get 5% of a number, we times that number by 5/100, which can be simplified to 1/20. So 220 x 1/20 = 220/20 First divide top and bottom by 10 to get 22/2, and then we can divide top and bottom by 2 to get 11/1 = £11. So Jodie earns £11 because of how many books she manages to sell.

The final part is to add the two together, how much she earns from working there, and the commission she gets from selling the books, which is 19.50+11=£30.50.

So on Saturday Jodie earns £30.50