Hi! Welcome to Math Antics.

Now that you know all about fractions, from watching all of our fractions videos,

it’s time to learn about something called “percentages”.

Percentages are super important.

Have you ever been in a math class and heard another student ask the teacher:

Um.. excuse me… teacher…

Ah… when are we ever gonna use this stuff?

Ya know… like in real life?

Well when it comes to percentages, the answer is one-hundred percent of the time.

Well alright… maybe not a hundred percent of the time… but a lot!

Percentages are used every day to calculate things like:

…how much sales tax you pay when you buy something.

…how much something costs when it’s on sale.

…how much fiber is in your granola bar.

…or how much money you can make if you invest it in the stock market.

That’s all real life stuff for sure.

So, you can see that it’s really important to understand percentages and how we use them in math.

Alright then… are you ready to learn the key to understanding percentages, or percents as they’re called for short?

Drum roll please…

A percent is a fraction!

Whaaaat?

That’s right… a percent IS a fraction!

And since you already know all about fractions, learning about percents is gonna be easy.

But a percent isn’t just any old fraction. A percent is a special fraction that always has 100 as the bottom number.

If it’s a percent, then no matter what the top number is, the bottom number will be 100.

In fact, because the bottom number of a percent is always 100, we don’t even write it.

Instead, we use this handy little symbol (%) called a percent sign.

Whenever you see this symbol after a number, it means the number is a percent.

It’s really a fraction with 100 on the bottom, but it’s just being written in this more compact form.

...like this number 15 here.

It’s got the percent sign after it, so we read it as "15 percent",

and because a percent is really a fraction that always has 100 as the bottom number,

we know that it means the same thing as 15 over 100.

Percents make even more sense if you know what the word precent means.

The prefix of the word (per) means “for each” or “for every”. Ya know like if someone said, “only one cookie per person”.

And the root word (cent) is Latin for 100. That’s why there’s 100 cents in a dollar.

So, percent literally means “per 100” and that’s why they’re shortcuts for writing fractions that have 100 as the bottom number.

Alright then, so whenever you see a percent like this, you know it can be replaced with (or converted) to a fraction.

Let’s look at a few examples so you see the pattern.