Answer
Last year's salary was $46,500.
Work Step by Step
First, we need to define our unknown. What we want to find out is last year's salary, which we shall designate as $x$: This will be our unknown.
We will need to add the amount of the salary increase to last year's salary to get this year's salary of $50,220$ dollars.
Because the amount of the salary increase is $8$%, the amount of the increase can be given by the expression (8%)$(x)$. 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 $0.08$.
We can now set up the following equation to find last year's salary:
$$x + 0.08x = 50,220$$
We combine like terms:
$$1.08x = 50,220$$
To solve for $x$, we divide both sides of the equation by $1.08$:
$$x = 46,500$$
Last year's salary was $46,500.
