Reading and Writing Percents

 Rewriting a Decimal as a Percent

First we use a place value table to illustrate the conversion of a decimal to a percent to show the movement of the decimal two positions to the right from after the ones position to after the hundredths position.

Also note that once we have a value written as a ratio in the fraction form "over 100", we convert directly to percent by the definition of percent. This is where the infamous "move the decimal point 2 places" rule comes from. What we are really doing is "reading the decimal value at the hundredths place value" as a way of getting a denominator of 100.

Values like and are not in the form of common fractions, since the numerator and denominator of a common fraction must be a whole number and 87.5 and 0.25 are not whole numbers. But these are arithmetic values that can be computed and they are exactly equal to the decimals 0.875 and 0.0025, respectively.

Self Check Problems

0.25	Solution
0.182	Solution
1.35	Solution
41	Solution

 

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