AoPSWiki
Do you have what it takes to be the next brilliant trader, researcher, or developer at Jane Street Capital? Find out in the Careers in Mathematics Forum.
Personal tools

1985 AJHSME Problems/Problem 21

From AoPSWiki

Problem

Mr. Green receives a 10\% raise every year. His salary after four such raises has gone up by what percent?

\text{(A)}\ \text{less than }40\% \qquad \text{(B)}\ 40\% \qquad \text{(C)}\ 44\% \qquad \text{(D)}\ 45\% \qquad \text{(E)}\ ...

Solution

If he gets a 10\% raise, then his new salary is 1.1 of what it was before. He gets 4 raises, so his new salary is 1.1^4 of the previous salary. We want to know the percent of increase from 1, so we just need 1.1^4-1 as a percent.

If you know your powers of 11 well, then you can just do 1.4641-1=.4641>45\%, so the answer is \boxed{\text{E}}

If you don't know this, then first we note that 1.1^4 clearly does not have a whole number percent representation, so the only possible choices are \text{A} and \text{E}. We also have 1.1^4=1.21^2>1.2^2=1.44

so the percent is greater than 40\% and the only choice left is \boxed{\text{E}}.

See Also

1985 AJHSME (ProblemsResources)
Preceded by
Problem 20
Followed by
Problem 22
1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25
Looking for a challenging geometry text? Preparing for MATHCOUNTS or the AMC exams? Check out Art of Problem Solving's Introduction to Geometry by Richard Rusczyk.
© Copyright 2008 AoPS Incorporated. All Rights Reserved. • FoundationPrivacyContact Us