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# The meaning of percent

Video transcript
We're asked to shade 20% of the square below. Before doing that, let's just even think about what percent means. Let me just rewrite it. 20% is equal to-- I'm just writing it out as a word-- 20 percent, which literally means 20 per cent. And if you're familiar with the word century, you might already know that cent comes from the Latin for the word hundred. This literally means you can take cent, and that literally means 100. So this is the same thing as 20 per 100. If you want to shade 20%, that means, if you break up the square into 100 pieces, we want to shade 20 of them. 20 per 100. So how many squares have they drawn here? So if we go horizontally right here, we have one, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight, nine, ten squares. If we go vertically, we have one, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight, nine, ten. So this is a 10 by 10 square. So it has 100 squares here. Another way to say it is that this larger square-- I guess that's the square that they're talking about. This larger square is a broken up into 100 smaller squares, so it's already broken up into the 100. So if we want to shade 20% of that, we need to shade 20 of every 100 squares that it is broken into. So with this, we'll just literally shade in 20 squares. So let me just do one. So if I just do one square, just like that, I have just shaded 1 per 100 of the squares. 100 out of 100 would be the whole. I've shaded one of them. That one square by itself would be 1% of the entire square. If I were to shade another one, if I were to shade that and that, then those two combined, that's 2% of the entire square. It's literally 2 per 100, where 100 would be the entire square. If we wanted to do 20, we do one, two, three, four-- if we shade this entire row, that will be 10%, right? One, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight, nine, ten. And we want to do 20, so that'll be one more row. So I can shade in this whole other row right here. And then I would have shaded in 20 of the 100 squares. Or another way of thinking about it, if you take this larger square, divide it into 100 equal pieces, I've shaded in 20 per 100, or 20%, of the entire larger square. Hopefully, that makes sense.