Answer
The DVD player originally cost $140.
Work Step by Step
First, we need to define our unknown. What we want to find out is the original price of the DVD player, which we shall designate as $x$: This will be our unknown.
We will need to subtract the amount of the reduction from the original price to get the final price of $98$ dollars.
Because the amount of the reduction is $30$%, the amount of the reduction can be given by the expression (30%)$(x)$. We cannot work directly with percentages, so we change the percent into a decimal. We do this by dividing the percentage by $100$ to get rid of the percentage sign. The percentage becomes $0.30$.
We can now set up the following equation to find the original price of the DVD player:
$$x - 0.30x = 98$$
We combine like terms:
$$0.7x = 98$$
To solve for $x$, we divide both sides of the equation by $0.7$:
$$x = 140$$
The DVD player originally cost $140.
