Worksheet 1

Name Class Date

‘Per cent’ (%) means ‘out of a hundred’. If 30 out of a hundred pupils in a school chose to do

hockey instead of netball, you could say that or 30% chose hockey.

If there were only 50 girls, and 10 of them chose hockey, what percentage of the girls is
that?

10 out 50 is . To get this out of 100, we multiply the top and bottom by 2, which is

or 20%.

17 out of 45 boys chose to do tennis. What is that as a percentage?

First we need to write this as a decimal.

or 17  45  0.377... or 0.38 to two significant figures.

Now we convert the decimal into a fraction by writing the numbers above the lowest place

value (see Skills sheet ‘Fractions, decimals and ratios’). This is or 38%.

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1 Work out the percentages for these examples.

a 35 out of 50 teachers in a school are women.

b 24 pupils out of a class of 30 remembered their homework.

c Jane got 14 marks out of 20 in a test.

d Only 100 out of 800 pupils in a school walk to school in the mornings.

Working out numbers from a percentage

You should know that 50% is and that 25% is .

For more complicated ones, write out the fraction and use a calculator.

So, 32% of 70 is the same as (the  means ‘of’).

Work this out on a calculator: 32  100 ( 0.32) and then 0.32  70  22.4

2 Work out the numbers for these examples.

a 80% of pupils in a class of 30 passed a test.

b 70% of pupils in Year 7 have a computer at home. There are 200 pupils in Year 7.

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 c 20% of 60 cars in the school car park are red.

d 40% of 500 pupils in the school have black hair.

I can...

 calculate and use percentages.

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