romitvsingh wrote:If the cost price of 20 articles is equal to the selling price of 16 articles. What is the percentage of profit or loss that the merchant makes?

The wording in this question is somewhat ambiguous, but I'll assume that we bought 20 articles and then sold all 20 articles.

For this question, it's probably best to plug in numbers.

To begin, we want the total wholesale cost of 20 items to equal the total revenue from selling 16 of those items . So, what is a nice wholesale cost per item and a nice sale price per item?

Well, if we make $16 the wholesale cost of each item, and make $20 the sale price of each item, then we see that: total wholesale cost of 20 items = total revenue from selling 16 items [since (20)($16) = (16)($20)]

So, if the wholesale cost per item is $16 and the sale price per item is $20, the profit is $4 per item.

So, the percent profit = 4/16 expressed as a percent, which equals 25%

Cheers,
Brent