SNAP Profit, Loss and Discount Previous Year Questions

SNAP Profit, Loss and Discount PYQ, free to download as a 30-page PDF. The bank carries 20 solved questions from the 2006 to 2025 papers and takes roughly two days to work through, so split it across margins and false weights.

Questions run newest year first, with the options exactly as printed. The answer key follows, then a worked solution for each one.

SNAP Profit and Loss Weightage

Profit and loss sits in the Quantitative, Data Interpretation and Data Sufficiency section, 20 of SNAP's 60 questions. It is one of the topics SNAP returns to most often, and it rarely tests a single formula on its own.

The recent papers lean on it harder than the middle years did. Eight of the twenty come from 2021 onward, usually layering two or three ideas into one question.

What the 20 Questions Cover

• Markup and discount together, where a labelled price is marked up then discounted and the two do not cancel
• False weights and faulty balances, including one question that cheats on both the buying and the selling side
• Chained resales, where an article passes through three hands at different gains and losses
• Blends sold at a margin, where the cost per unit must be built before any profit is taken
• Data sufficiency, where the question is whether the statements pin the cost price down at all

How to Approach the Set

Set the cost price to 100 whenever the question is entirely in percentages. It removes the algebra outright and it works on more of this bank than any other single habit.

Keep the two bases apart: discount sits on the marked price, profit sits on the cost price. Mixing them is what the markup-then-discount questions are built to catch. Successive discounts compound, so multiply what survives rather than adding the discounts together.

A false weight applies to the cost side only. It changes what the seller gives up, never what the buyer pays, and getting that the wrong way round inverts the answer.

When None of the Options Is Right

One question here resolves to "none of these" and is worth studying rather than skipping. An article is labelled to earn 30% profit, then sold at a 10% discount on that label.

Take the cost as 100. The label is 130, the sale is 117, so the profit is exactly 17%. The options offer 18%, 15% and 20%, and the reasoning that 30 minus 10 leaves 20 is precisely the error being tested.

Common Mistakes

• Subtracting a discount from a markup as though both sat on the same base
• Adding two successive discounts instead of compounding what remains
• Measuring profit against the cost of only the goods sold when the question says outlay
• Applying a false weight to the revenue rather than to the cost
• Reading 33.33% as 0.3333 instead of exactly one third, which breaks a whole-number answer

Two to Solve First

The 2021 question where the seller cheats on both sides, taking 300 g extra when buying and giving 300 g short when selling, in 5 kg packets, while claiming to sell at cost. The two cheats do not simply add. Converting each into an actual weight against a fixed sum of money is the only reliable route.

Then the 2023 mixing-ratio pair. The same two sugars blended 3:2 return 10% profit and blended 2:3 return 5%, at one fixed selling price. Turning each profit into the blend's cost gives two linear equations that fix the ratio of the cost prices.

Video Solutions

Source: MBA Pathshala

Using the Answer Key

Attempt the whole set before checking anything, allowing about ninety seconds each. Mark the key in one pass, right or wrong only, then read the solution for every miss and every lucky guess. Each opens with a one-line quick solution you can stop at and retry from.

For the rest of the section, the SNAP Averages, Mixtures and Alligation PYQs and the SNAP Permutations, Combinations and Probability PYQs cover the other repeated quant topics.