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Working with Percents


Mike McGarry
Lesson by Mike McGarry
Magoosh Expert

Summary
Mastering the use of percents in mathematical problems is crucial for tackling a variety of questions on the ACT exam, including direct percent calculations and finding unknown percentages.
  • Percents can be viewed as multipliers, which are their decimal forms, to simplify calculations.
  • The basic principles include understanding that 'is' means equal, 'of' means multiply, converting percents to multipliers, and replacing unknowns with variables.
  • To find an unknown percent, set up an equation with the percent as a variable and solve for it, remembering the result is the decimal form of the percent.
  • For percents that are easily converted to fractions (e.g., 50%, 25%), using fractions can simplify calculations.
  • Practice problems are provided to reinforce the understanding and application of these concepts.
Chapters
00:00
Percents as Multipliers
01:41
Finding Unknown Percents
02:15
Percents and Fractions

Solutions to the Practice Problems:

1) What is 60% of 60 

Let's translate this into a simple equation.

What --> "x" or what we are trying to find.

is --> "="

60% --> 60/100 or .6

of --> " *" 

x = .6 * 60

x = 36

So all we did was multiply 0.6*60 and we get 36 as our answer.

2) 52 is 40% of what number?

is --> "="

40% --. 40/100 or .4

of --> " * "

what number --> x

52 = .4 * x

We divide both sides by 0.4 and we get X = 52/0.4 = 130

Let's do a check and make sure we did everything right.

3) 18 is what percent of 45?

Before we do anything math let's do a ball park. We know that half of 45 is 22.5 So without doing any math/computation we know that 50% of 45 is 22.5 so 18 is going to be less than 50>#/p###

is --> " ="

what percent --> x/100 

of --> "*"

18 = (x/100) * 45

18/45 = x/100

.4 = x/100

40 = x

So 18 is 40% of 45. 

Notice we can simply divide 18 by 45 to get .4

.4 is 40% in decimal form.

4) What is 50% of 128? [64]

This one you're just dividing 128 by 2.

x = .5 * 128 or 128/2

128/2 = 64