ShmoopTube

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Here's your shmoop du jour, brought to you by Traveling Salesmen.

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If you turn out all the lights and hide under your bed, they won't even know you're home.

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A salesman earns a base pay of $12/hour plus 5% commission on his sales.

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If he sells $35,000 worth of goods working seven 8-hour days, how much is his total pay?

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Okay, so we're trying to find the total income of a salesman.

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His pay comes from two sources: Hourly rate, and commission.

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The sum of the two is what we're looking for.

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First, we'll find his hourly rate.

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Well each hour, the salesman earns 12 bucks, but how long did he work?

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Well, he worked seven 8 hour days,

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so we can just get a total by multiplying the two and we get 7 times 8 is

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56 hours total for that week.

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Now we just multiply $12 per hour by 56 hours and that gets us $672 in a week,

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but we can't forget his 5% commission on his $35,000 of sales.

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We can multiply 35,000 by .05 to get $1,750.

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From his hourly rate, the salesman earns $672, and another $1,750 from commission.

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And it totals $2,422.

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Not bad for a week's work.

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