Cheatsheet: Profit & Loss | General Aptitude for GATE - Mechanical Engineering PDF Download

Theory

Profit, Loss and Discount is an easy topic in quantitative section. Every year, a small number of questions appear from this section and good students should aim to get all the questions right from this topic. The number of concepts in these topics is limited and most of the problems can be solved by applying the formulae directly. Many students commit silly mistakes in this topic due to complacency and this should be avoided.

Formula

If Cost Price of an article is C.P. and Selling Price is S.P. then
(i) Profit percent

(ii) Similarly loss percent  

(iii) If an article is sold for two different prices (S.P₁ and S.P₂) such that there will be two profit percents (P₁ and P₂) respectively.

Note: In case of loss treat that loss as negative profit.
(iv) If the Cost price of M articles is equal to the selling price of N articles then the profit percent is given by
If (M–N) is negative then treat profit as loss.
(v) If an article is sold after allowing a certain discount (d%) on marked price (M.P.) then the selling price (S.P.) is given by S.P. = (100 – d)% × M.P
(vi) If the marked price of an article is a% above the cost price and a discount d% is allowed then the profit percent (p) would be
 
(vii) If an article is sold after allowing two successive discounts of d₁%  and d₂% then selling price (S.P) is given by S.P =
(viii) Two successive discounts of d₁ and d₂ are equivalent to a single discount of

Tips

Total change in price due to two subsequent changes of X% and Y% is (X+Y+XY/100)% 

Solved Example