Save & Help [The following information applies to the questions displayed below.) Consider the following letter and answer Shady's question. To my friendly student tax preparer: Hello, my name is Shady Slim. I understand you are going to help me figure out my gross income for the year... whatever that means. It's been a busy year and I'm a busy man, so let me give you the lowdown on my life and you can do your thing I was unemployed at the beginning of the year and got $2,000 in unemployment compensation. I later got a job as a manager for Roca Cola. I earned $55,000 in base salary this year. My boss gave me a $5,000 Christmas bonus check on December 22. I decided to hold on to that check and not cash it until next year, so I won't have to pay taxes on it this year. Pretty smart, huh? My job's pretty cool. I get a lot of fringe benefits like a membership to the gym that costs $400 a year and all the Roca Cola I can drink, although I can't really drink a whole lori figure $40 worth this year. As part of my manager duties, I get to decide on certain things like contracts for the company. My good buddy. Eddie, runs a bottling company. I made sure that he won the bottling contract for Roca Cola for this year (even though his contract wasn't quite the best). Eddie bought me a Corvette this year for being such a good friend. The Corvette cost $50,000, and I'm sure he bought it for me out of the goodness of his heart. What a great guy! Here's a bit of good luck for the year. Upon leaving my office one day, I found $8,000 lying in the street Well, one person's bad luck is my good luck, right? I like to gamble a lot. I won a $27.000 poker tournament in Las Vegas this year. I also won about $5,000 over the year playing the guys at our Friday night poker game. Can you believe that I didn't lose anything this year