Percent Proportions Activities

Monday, December 03, 2012 11:02 AM

Approaching Percents with Proportions

1) Write a proportion you could use to solve the following problem. Be sure to include the units. 16 cookies require 1.5 cups of flour. How many cups of flour would 20 cookies require?

2) Rewrite the proportion with ONLY the units.

3) Explain how the units in a proportion are essential when setting up a proportion.
You need to line up the numbers when setting up the proportion because the answer will not be correct and the whole problem will be out of whack.

4) What does percent mean? Out of 100. 5) Write 30% as a fraction. 30/100 6) What is the denominator of any percent written as a fraction?
100

7) Think of percent as part of a whole. What number would represent the whole? 100 8) If I have a bowl of apples and 50 out of 120 are red apples, what is the part and what is the whole in this
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8) If I have a bowl of apples and 50 out of 120 are red apples, what is the part and what is the whole in this situation? 50 red apples is the part and 120 is the whole.

9) Set up a proportion to figure out what percent of the apples in the previous question are red and solve.

10) Use the units in the previous problem to create a formula for working with percents. Percent of 100 equals part over whole. The percent denominator is always 100. In the problem above we want to figure out what percent 50 is of 120. The denominator is 100 and we are trying to figure out what x is. 11) Use your formula to answer the following question: 150 out of 720 students at Cary Academy have been in the All About Animals club. What percent of students, rounded to the nearest whole, have been in the All About Animals club?

12) Make up a word problem that can be solved with your formula and apply the formula to your word problem. Lauren and her mother made cupcakes. In total she ate 4 out of the 20 cupcakes she made. What percent of the cupcakes did she eat?

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