How to Calculate Percentage

You should know how to calculate percentage because lots of people talk about percentages in business, science and other settings. This is an important concept that everyone should understand because it is so widely used. Lots of math and science classes taught us how to calculate percentage. However, there are still lots of people that do not understand this concept fully. This article gives a detailed explanation and examples.

Instructions

1. Lots of people in business and science talk about things in percentages. It is imperative to understand the concept of percentage before being able to calculate percentage. When people are talking in percentages, they are talking about fractions of a whole (100% in this case). For example, if people say 20% of the apples are big, they are saying in 100 apples, there are 20 that are big. However, not all sample sizes have exactly 100. Here is another example; there are 40 apples that are red in 200 apples. In this case, it is also 20% of the apples that are red.

2. Here is how you calculate percentage, number of a single unit / total units in the group and multiply that result number by 100. There are no units associated with percentage because dividing cancels out the units.

3. It might confuse you when someone says there are 20% of red shoes in 560 pairs of shoes in the warehouse. So exactly how many pairs of shoes are red? Here is how you approach the problem, convert the percentage into a decimal, which is 0.2. Multiply 0.2 by 560 which gives you the pairs of shoes that is red. If you do the calculations correctly, you should get 112.

4. Here is a formula that should help you approach any percentage problem. Simply identify what you are solving for and plug in the rest of the information in the equation.

   D x T = O

   Where d stands for percentage in decimal, when it's 20% decimal is 0.2, when it's 40%, decimal is 0.4 and so on. T stands for total number of units. And O stands for number of a single unit.