How do you take the percentage of a quantity?

Question

Let's say, for example that I have 49.50 USD and I want to take 3 percent of that amount.
How do I do that?
I can' remember. First to answer correct, 10 pts.

thanks

Answer 1

An Engineer's answer:

In word problems, "OF" means Times (multiply),
and "PER" means divide.

Thus, "3% OF" means that you have to MULTIPLY by .03 to get the answer.

A good example of the use of PER is in how fast you are going. We state it as

Miles PER Hour, or simply MPH.

But technically it means
Miles divided by Hours, or M/H, or MPH

This means that you DIVIDE the Miles by the number of Hours it took you to get there, to find out how fast you were going.

You may have to express the hours as a decimal... like six minutes is 0.1 hour.

(The number on the top of the fraction -- the Numerator, is Divided by the number on the bottom of the fraction -- the Denominator. Sometimes called the "divisor")

Practice with "number of cents PER dollar" etc. where we have cents/dollar (= 100), or "ounces Per pound" = 16/1 = 16 etc,

Interesting... in the money example above, we have both "of" and "PER" in the same sentence. It looks like given a choice with both terms in the same sentence, the "Per" wins out over the "of"!

What this means is, that you do the PER (division) first, as in 100/1 or 16/1, and then when you've done that, multiply the result of your division by 1 (the word "of" in the sentence), and you get the clean answer of 16, for example, without the 1 underneath. (16/1 times 1 just equals 16.)

Get it?

Anyway, in dealing with word problems, just remember the opening sentence above, and you'll have a good head start towards figuring out what it means:


"OF" means Times, and "PER" means divide.


That's the rule, and that's all there is to it.


Unlike grammar rules, where the so-called "rules" depend upon "fashion" or popular usage, the properties of mathematics are very precise. A case in point with grammar is the "i before e, except..." rule, where one wonders if it had been stated as "e before I", would the list of exceptions have been any shorter? How about "EXCEPT in the lower east side of town?" :-)

Answer 2

Just try 49.50 x .03 = 1.49 if you round up. Use same method on similar questions.

Answer 3

49.50 x .03 = 1.485

Answer 4

multiply 49.5 by .03