tax returns
Probelm
At his job, Kirby earned total of $2,128 in 2014. How much will Kirby owe in taxes, and how much will he get as his tax return?
process
When we first came into class, we watched a video that showed high school Kirby and Aurmon talking about taxes. Kirby, who worked at In N Out, didn't know that he had to file taxes. Our class decided to figure out how much money Kirby owes or how much he will get from a tax return. The first paper we received was Kirby's W-2 which gave us the amount of money he made and the amount of money that was withheld. The paper honestly did not make sense to me or any of my group members. The next paper we received was the 1040EZ form. We had to take information from the W-2 and fill out the 1040EZ. It took me a while to figure out where to even start. Everything was confusing which was very frustrating. Eventually, we worked together and figured out numbers 1-13 on the 1040EZ. We realized that we could not move on to the next number without the number before it. For example, number 4 on the 1040EZ could not be added without filling out numbers 1, 2, and 3.
|
solution
We are not sure if we got the right answers, but after working on it for some time, my group found that Kirby would get $266 dollars back from his tax return. We figured this out from the W-2 form, box number 2. We also think that he would not have to pay any taxes ($0.00) because of what it says in box 14 on the 1040EZ form.
|
evaluation of problem & self ASSESSMENT
I thought that this was a pretty difficult problem , not only because the math involved with finding the solutions was tricky, but because we had never seen anything like this before. In my opinion, the forms were confusing to read because there was so much information and so many different numbers on them. However, I do think that this was a really cool problem because it is exactly what we will be doing in a couple of years, or as soon as we start to work, I should say. I think that doing more of this kind of stuff- things that we will be doing as adults- is really good practice and is very useful. And even though this problem was difficult, I thought that I did a good job at working on filling out the forms with my group. It got a bit confusing at times because there was so much information on the sheets, but my group and I were persistent and able to work through it.