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Exam path · Profit & Loss

Profit and loss questions, against a real clock

Profit and loss questions hand you two of cost price, selling price and percentage, and ask for the third. The percentage is always taken on cost price unless the paper says otherwise, and that one rule settles most of them. In a bank prelims you have roughly forty-five seconds each, so the target is a single line of arithmetic rather than an equation you solve.

Profit, loss and discount are worth two to three marks in almost every banking and SSC prelims paper, and they are among the most reliably scoreable questions on it — the arithmetic is small and the patterns repeat. What costs candidates the marks is not difficulty but seconds: writing SP = CP × (100 + p)/100, rearranging it, then dividing. The drill below is timed precisely so you stop rearranging and start recognising.

Try it against the clock. Profit & Loss runs at 35s easy, 45s medium and 60s hard. The clock is stamped and judged on our server, so the limit you see is the deadline that is actually enforced — and it starts when you tap Start, not while the question is loading.

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3 real profit and loss questions, with worked solutions

Generated by the same engine that mints the ComputePrep daily. Each answer is computed from the numbers printed in the question, and the walkthrough below each one is the engine's own working — not a solution written afterwards. Reload this page's live drill and you get different numbers.

Question 1

An article costs ₹1200 and is sold at a profit of 12%.

What is the selling price?

  1. 144
  2. 1200
  3. 1056
  4. 1344
  5. 1212
Show the worked solution
  1. Profit = 12% of ₹1200 = ₹144.
  2. SP = ₹1200 + ₹144 = ₹1344.
  3. Answer: 1344.

Question 2

An article costs ₹600 and is sold at a profit of 50%.

What is the selling price?

  1. 900
  2. 300
  3. 650
  4. 903
  5. 600
Show the worked solution
  1. Profit = 50% of ₹600 = ₹300.
  2. SP = ₹600 + ₹300 = ₹900.
  3. Answer: 900.

Question 3

An article is sold for ₹7820, at a profit of 15%.

What was the cost price?

  1. 8840
  2. 7820
  3. 1020
  4. 6800
  5. 6647
Show the worked solution
  1. A profit of 15% means SP = 115% of CP.
  2. So CP = ₹7820 × 100 ÷ 115 = ₹6800 — the percentage is always on COST price, never on the selling price.
  3. Answer: 6800.

How to solve profit and loss questions in one line

  1. Decide what the percentage sits on

    Profit and loss percentages are on cost price. Discount percentages are on marked price. Getting this wrong is not an arithmetic slip — it produces a clean, plausible, wrong number that will be among the options.

  2. Turn the percentage into a multiplier, not an equation

    A 25% profit means SP = 1.25 × CP, so CP = SP ÷ 1.25 = SP × 4/5. Working in fractions (25% = 1/4, 20% = 1/5, 12.5% = 1/8) removes the division entirely: ₹6000 at 50% profit is ₹6000 × 2/3 = ₹4000, done in your head.

  3. For successive discounts, multiply — never add

    20% then 10% off is not 30% off. It is 0.8 × 0.9 = 0.72, so 28%. The single-figure equivalent of successive discounts a and b is a + b − ab/100, and 30% will always be sitting there as an option.

  4. Sanity-check the direction before you tap

    Profit means SP is above CP; loss means below. A one-second glance at whether your answer is on the right side of the given number kills most careless errors, and it is faster than re-deriving.

The percentages worth knowing as fractions

PercentageUse it as
12.5%1/8 — so a 12.5% profit means SP = 9/8 of CP
16.66%1/6 — a 16.66% loss means SP = 5/6 of CP
20%1/5 — CP = SP × 5/6 when profit is 20%
25%1/4 — CP = SP × 4/5 when profit is 25%
33.33%1/3 — CP = SP × 3/4 when profit is 33.33%
50%1/2 — CP = SP × 2/3 when profit is 50%

Common mistakes this drill is built from

The wrong options are not random numbers. Each one is the result of a specific careless error for this topic, so picking one tells you which habit is costing you marks.

Taking the percentage on the selling price

The commonest error in the whole topic. If an article sells for ₹6000 at 50% profit, the cost is not ₹3000 — it is ₹4000, because the 50% is 50% of the cost, not of the sale. ₹3000 is always among the options.

Adding successive discounts

Two discounts of 20% and 10% give 28%, not 30%. The gap is small enough to look like rounding and large enough to be a different option.

Answering the question the setter did not ask

Half of these questions ask for cost price and half for selling price or profit percent. Under a clock it is easy to compute correctly and then tap the number you computed on the way, which is also on the list.

FAQ

Are profit and loss questions asked in IBPS and SBI prelims?

Yes. Profit, loss and discount is a standard arithmetic topic in the quantitative aptitude section of IBPS PO and Clerk, SBI PO and Clerk, RRB and SSC papers, usually worth two to three marks in prelims and more in mains.

How long should a profit and loss question take?

About 35 to 60 seconds in prelims, which is exactly the window this drill enforces: 35 seconds on easy, 45 on medium and 60 on hard, judged on the server. If a question is taking you longer than a minute, the fix is usually the fraction method rather than more practice.

Is the percentage taken on cost price or selling price?

Profit percent and loss percent are always on cost price unless the question explicitly says otherwise. Discount percent is on marked price. Mixing the two is the single most common source of wrong answers in this topic.

Do the practice questions repeat?

No. Every question is generated fresh and its answer is computed from the numbers printed in the question, so nothing is drawn from a fixed bank and nothing can be memorised or leaked between users.

Is it free, and do I need an account?

It is free with no account. You can drill profit and loss as often as you like without signing up or giving an email address.

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