Working out percentages at first, seems very complicated. However once you know how to do work them out, you will just think to yourself 'why on earth could I not do that before?'
There is more than one way of working out percentages. We shall go through some of the ways on this post with the aid of examples.
One of the easiest ways to explain how to work out percentages is using the example of money. Consider the following question:
What is 10% of £5.00?
To start off, we need the value we are calculating the 10% from. This value we are taking the percentage from is in fact 100% which in this case is £5.00. So we ask ourselves, how can we get from 100% to 10%? The answer is to divide 100% by 10, to get to 10%. Now we do whatever we did to the 100%, to the value in question.
So we divided the 100% by 10. Therefore we must divide our value by 10. Our value in the question £5.00. If we were to divide £5.00 by 10, we would get £0.50 or 50p. And that's the answer!
Here is another example:
What is 30% of 100 sweets?
Again, the principles from above apply here. We need to remember the value is 100%. Therefore, 100 sweets = 100%. We then ask ourselves, how can we get from 100% to 30%?
A simple way of working this out is to first get 10%. So to get from 100% to 10% we just divide our 100% value by 10.
100% = 100 sweets
10% = 10 sweets.
Remember, what we do to our starting percentage (100%), we do to our value. As we divided our percentage by 10 to get to 10%, we divided our value by 10 to go from 100 sweets to 10 sweets.
Now that we have 10%, we now ask ourselves how do we get from 10% to 30%? Well we can just multiply 10% by 3 to get 30%.
10% = 10 sweets
30% = 30 sweets
We multiplied our percentage of 10% by 3 to get 30%. But we must remember that whatever we do to our percentage, we must also do that to our value and hence, we end up with an answer of 30 sweets.
Hope that helped, if not have another read and if you're still not sure, just leave a comment and I'll get back to you.
Thanks for reading!
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