2016 sales tax in Maine: 5.5%
Wes bought (in dollars):
Jacket: $49.95
Pants: $17.50
First method:
The combined price of those two garments:
pants_and_jacket_price = 49.95 + 17.50 = $67.45
Now, we need to apply the sales tax to this:
5.5% of $67.45 = 5.5*67.45/100 = $3.70975
Finally, we add the pants and jacket price and the sales tax:
total = $67.45 + $3.71 = $71.16
Second method:
We apply the taxes sale individually for the jacket and the pants:
Sales tax:
Jacket: 5.5% of $49.95 = $2.74725
Pants: 5.5% of $17.50 = $0.9625
The total sales tax is: $2.74725 + $0.9625 = $3.70975
Now, we add this to the prices of the jacket and the pants:
total = $49.95 + $17.50 + $3.71 = $71.16
We have these two methods because of the distributive property of multiplication. The sales tax calculation is a multiplication of 5.5/100 (this is the 5.5%) times the total price. But the total price is a sum, the sum of the prices of the jacket and the pants. This is:
sales_tax = 5.5*(49.95 + 17.50)/100 = 5.5*49.95/100 + 5.5*17.50/100
Because of the distributive property, we can solve the problem in two ways. The first method is taking the sum of the prices and then calculate the total sales tax. The second method calculates the sales tax of each garment, and then we add these individual sales taxes to obtain the total one.
