At her current job, Mary gets a 1.5% raise twice per year. Which of the following choices represents Mary’s current income y years after starting the job at a starting salary of s?
Options removed as they were not correctly formatted-Mod
Can you please format the options?
But basically, a 1.5% raise would mean the salary becomes 101.5% of the initial salary after the raise. so 101.5% is nothing but salary times 1.015
If your finding difficulty with the algebra just use choosing numbers for y and s.
Do you think we can use compound Interest in here?
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Yes, I think so, and we might have to substitute the compounding frequency of 2
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In that case, will 1.5 get divided by 100 or by 200? I know exponent will be 2y.
Could you please explain how?
the real trap is not to divide the rate as we have no compounding given to us
Yes, you are right! I’ll just delete my answer to avoid any confusion 
I was like lets do compound and then I divided but then the answer I got was no where to be found , the I read the question like 2 times to understand we are not compounding anything , nasty trap by whosoever wrote it.
Could you please explain why we didnt do 1.5/200 and did 1.5/100 only?
What you’re given is:
- the initial salary as ‘s’
- the number of years as ‘y’
- raise percentage as ‘1.5%’ and it is raised twice in a year period.
First we need to convert 1.5% to decimal which is just \frac{1.5}{100}
Now, as we know this raise occurs twice a year , thus \left(\frac{1.5}{100}\right)^2, this is the amount for 1 year. But the question ask for 'y ’ years so the equation will be modified to
\left(\frac{1.5}{100}\right)^{2\times y},\text{where 'y' is the number of years}
Now, we need to multiply the base salary ‘s’ to get the final answer.
s\times \left(\frac{1.5}{100}\right)^{2\times y},\text{where 'y' is the number of years & 's' is the base salary}
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