Question

An article was purchased for Rs. 1239 including GST of 18%. Find the price of the article before GST was added?

Answer 1

Hint: Let the price of the article before adding GST be Rs. x. If we add 18% of x, i.e., the GST and equate the result to Rs. 1239. Solve the equation you get by representing it mathematically and find the value of x.

Complete step by step solution:
Let us start the solution to the above question by letting the price of the article before the addition of the GST to be Rs. x.
Now, it is given that the GST charged on the article is 18%, which actually refers to 18% of the price before addition of the GST, i.e., x. So, the GST in terms of x can be represented as:
$\text{GST charged}=\dfrac{18}{100}\times x$
Now we know that the final selling price including the GST is Rs. 1239, so if we add the GST with the price before the GST was charged, the sum should be Rs. 1239. If we represent this in form of mathematical equation, we get
$1239=x+\dfrac{18}{100}\times x$
If we take the LCM of the RHS of the equation to be 100, we get
$1239=\dfrac{118}{100}x$
$\Rightarrow 1239=\dfrac{59}{50}x$
Now if we take 50 and 59 to the other side of the equation, 50 gets multiplied with the numerator and 59 goes to the denominator of the LHS.
$\dfrac{1239\times 50}{59}=x$
$\Rightarrow x=Rs.\text{ 1050}$
Therefore, we can conclude that the price of the article before the addition of GST is Rs. 1050.

Note: Remember we cannot predict whether a price is including the taxes or excluding the taxes until it is not mentioned in the question, so avoid any assumption related to taxes until mentioned in the question. However, the list price and the MRP are including all taxes and are the highest possible retail price.