Percentages Video Transcript

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Hey guys, Lindsay here, and today we're going to take a few minutes to
talk about percentages, decimals, fractions, and how to convert in
between them.

So, I have an example up here, and it says "Convert 45% to a decimal.".

Now, percent really means per 100.

"Cent" there's 100 cents in a dollar.

Cents means 100 and per if we look at that like this, 45% we could
actually write that as 45 per 100.

And that is actually how this is convert to a decimal, but there we have
it in fraction form.

And then if you were to take your calculator, do 45 divided by 100 you
would get that in decimal form.

But another way to do it is if I take my 45 up here, percent.

Now I don't see a decimal in that 45, and when I have a whole number, I
don't see a decimal.

The decimal is actually visible, and sitting right at the end.

So, this 45 has a decimal right there and if I want to convert 45 to a

decimal I'm going to divide it by 100.

Or you could think about it, like just moving the decimal two the left.

So, I'm going to take this decimal from the back of the five, and put it
here to the front.

That's one spot, then I'm going to do that again to the front of the
four, and my answer is going to be 0 decimal 4 5.

That's 45% written as a decimal.

If I want to take a look at a second example.

I'll just squeeze a second example in here.

What happens if I have a number that's bigger than two decimals or two
digits?

Let's say I have 256%.

If I wanted to write that as a decimal, again the decimal sitting right

there.
So, if I want to move that two to the left, in front of the six, now in
front of the five, 2.56 is 256% written as a decimal.

So hopefully that makes sense.

You're really just moving the decimal, and the nice thing about this is
if I've got a decimal, and I want to convert it back to a percent, I'm
just moving the decimal the other way.

So, I've got 5.21.

Now 5.21, I want to write that as a percentage.

I am going to move instead of moving the decimal to the left,

I'm going to move it to the right two.

So, 521, it doesn't have any decimals at the end, but I can't leave it
like that.

If I want to convert it into a percent, I need to make sure that I write

that percentage sign at the end to make it correct.

Let's take a look at one more example.

So, let's say that I wanted to convert a smaller number.

Let's say I wanted to convert nine to a percent.

And - wow, that's a smaller, a larger number, sorry.

I've got 5.21. Now I've got nine.

I want to convert nine to a percent.

I need to move the decimal this time to the right two.

The decimals right here, so I move it once, then I move it twice, but
there's nothing there to move it around, so I'm going to put zeros in as
placeholders.

So, nine converted into a percent would actually be 900%, so don't be

afraid if there is nothing to move around.

Just add zeros to make that happen.

Let me just make myself some room, and we'll look at a couple more
examples.

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Okay, so let's take a look at two more quick examples.

This time we're going to convert a percentage to a fraction, and we
actually did that in our first example, but we'll take a look at it just
kind of clearly on its own.

When I've got 20%, and I want to convert that into a fraction.

I'm going to take this number, the 20.

And then remember percent means per 100.

So, I'm just going to do this, 20%, 20 per 100.

There it is, and if I want to take that one step further I can reduce the
fraction.

So, couple of different ways to do this, but any number that you can
think of that divides evenly into both of those will work.

I'm going to start with 10.

10 divides evenly into 20, and 100.

I just get to remove one of the zeros.

Whoop, let's get rid of that extra zero I should have removed.

I've got two out of 10, but I can actually reduce that one step further
which is fine because those are both even numbers, so I end up with 1
over 5.

And that's the same as 20%. I have another example here.

I've got 2 over 10.

That's a percentage or sorry a fraction and I want to convert that into a

percent.

Now if you had your calculator it would be pretty quick and easy for you
to do that, because a fraction is just a division question.

So, in your calculator 2 divided by 10 would give you a number and if you
were to do that you would get 0.20 in your calculator.

There's my value as a decimal but if I want to know what that is as a

percent, here's another one of those times where I'm going to move the
decimal.

And this time I'm going to go two to the right, because just like our
last example we're going from decimal to percent, so this is going to the
right.

So, I get 20 percent.

So, it's kind of a handy skill to have, because if you got 2 out of 10 on
a test, you got 20% on that test, you didn't do very well.

But hopefully that helps you kind of understand the relationship between
fractions, and percents, and between decimals, and percentages.