An Overview on Percentage

The percentage is a Latin word that means “out of a hundred”. Percentages always describe a part of a whole, like in fractions or decimals, or parts. The percentage is considering anything as a hundred parts making a whole and describing a certain part out of it. It is denoted using the % symbol. 

Percentages are everywhere we look – in malls, shops, quoted as a discount rate, in business markets as the return amount, all over the internet, etc. Understanding and being able to work with percentages efficiently can help us adequately in daily life. 

What is the percentage? 

As the name suggests, percent means per hundred. Thus, when we find a percentage of anything, the whole is considered to be divided into 100 equal parts. Out of these hundred parts, each part is a percent. To understand this concept better, let us look at some examples:

Now consider a box that consists of 100 small boxes of the same volume and shape and all other dimensions are the same. Thus, these 100 boxes together make a single big box. Now each of these small boxes is a percentage that will together with the whole box that is a hundred percent and a whole big box.

Now there must be a doubt in the mind regarding how we would determine the percentage if there are more than a hundred boxes. Thus, let us again assume another 200 small boxes that are of the same dimensions that comprise the whole box. Here, every 1 percentage consists of 2 boxes. Similarly, as the number of boxes that make whole increases, the number of boxes that come in a percentage increases too.

Now, what do we do if there aren’t exact hundreds?

In that case, we will further divide the whole by a hundred, which will give us a decimal number. Now, this decimal number is one exact percentage of that whole number. It will always be easier to calculate things in hundreds than in thirds or so. Thus, the percentage makes calculations easier.

So all of the above information is useful when we can put this to use, which is possible when we know how to find percentages and do calculations with them. So we need to know how to find the percentage first.

Ways to find the percentage:

There is a way of doing so that is mostly used in calculations and is also easy:

Whenever we are given a number to find the percentage, first divide the number by a hundred. Doing so will fetch us the value of 1 percent of that number. Now that we know the value of 1 percent of the given number, we can multiply 1 percent by any number we want.

Now take an example. We need to find 60 percent of the number 5. Here first how much make 1 percent of 5. To do so we will divide 5 by a hundred which is 0.05. Now we can multiply the 1 percentage we found by 60, as we need to find 60 percent of the number 5. It will be exactly 3.

What if we are asked to add or subtract a percentage? What should we do?

 In that case, we must first find the percentage we need to add or subtract out of that number, as discussed above, and then we need to add or subtract that value obtained from the original number and our calculation is over. Let us  see an example:

Suppose, We need to add 15 percent to 8. First, we need to find 1 percent of 8 and, then multiply it by 15. So now we need to divide 8 by 100 which will be 0.08. This is 1 percent of 8. Thus, 15 percent will be 1.2. This is the amount we need to add to 8. So adding 15 percent to 8 will be 8 + 1.2 = 9.2. This is how it’s done.

There is another type of problem where we have to find what percentage is a certain number of the given whole number. Let us take an example to understand this as well. Let us suppose there is a question that says:

What percentage of 50 is 30?

In this kind of example, we need to divide the given number by the whole number and multiply it by a hundred to find the percentage it comprises of the whole number. So we will have to divide 3 by 50 and then multiply it by a hundred. On dividing 30 by 50 we get 0.6 a decimal number. Now we need to multiply 0.6 by 100. In doing so, we get 60% as the answer.  Thus, we discussed all the 3 different types of basic problems in percentage, which is necessary to apply the concepts of percentage anywhere.

Conclusion:

Thus in this article, we saw how percentages work, what they mean, which quantity they intend, and also how to find a percentage of a number to add or subtract from the given number. We also learned how to know what percent is a given number of the whole number. We should always keep in mind that numbers like 3 6 9 are never divisible by 100 even in decimals they tend to show infinite values. In such cases, we need to round the values and assume they divide the whole into 100 equal parts.