Fractions, Percentages and Decimals
Many people find this confusing and difficult. You can think of all three as simply three different ways of representing the same information. The fact that you can convert between them is the clue here - just like a temperature can be represented in Fahrenheit or Celsius, so numerical information can be represented as a fraction, percentage or decimal in addition to integers.
Fractions and Decimals
If we have the fraction 1/2, what is this as a decimal?
The answer is easy - simply divide the number on the top by the number on the bottom on a calculator, that is, do 'one divided by two' and you get the answer a half. Whenever you need to convert a fraction to a decimal, that is all that you need to do, whatever the fraction is.
So far, so easy.
Fractions and Percentages
If a quarter of people like drinking hot chocolate, what percentage of people like drinking hot chocolate?
In other words - express 1/4 as a percentage.
All we need to do here is add one more step to tat outlined in the 'fractions and decimals' section above. We divide one by four to get 0.25. We then multiply by 100 to get the percentage - which is 25%. The clue is 'per cent', which means 'per one hundred' from the Latin.
So that's also easy! And into the bargain we've seen how to convert decimals to percentages - just multiply by one hundred and add the percent sign.
So what is 0.9 as a percentage? It is 90%. What is 0.01 as a percentage? It is 1%.
And that's all there is to it!
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