Expand mobile version menu

Real-Life Activities

Real-Life Math -- Solution

Your new client wants a new website, so you'll need to provide a quote for your services.

First, you'll apply the 10 percent discount:

6,500 x 0.10 = 650

6,500 - 650 = 5,850

Then, you'll add the 8 percent tax:

5,850 x 1.08 = 6,318

Finally, you'll calculate the monthly payment:

6,318 / 12 = 526.50

The client will have to pay $526.50 per month for 12 months. This should be a lot easier than having to pay everything upfront!

"A lot of it is simple math formulas," says multimedia developer Matthew Cramer. "There's a site that I work on that is a fundraising site. We had to develop an application that would calculate the total profit for each group. And with that you have to take into account all of their sales. Then you have to calculate their profit, calculate what they owe the main company.... And there's actually a prize feature where they get prizes based on certain amounts of sales goals, so you have to calculate how many prizes they get and other things like that."

Even though the formulas tend to be basic, Cramer says math comes in handy more often than you might expect.

"With the web development... there are so many math formulas that you just do and you don't even realize it's math," says Cramer. "I think that [math] is a very, very useful skill to have."