Converting decimals to percents: 0.601

Percent literally means per 100. That's where the word comes from. Cent from cents or century or any of those words means 100. So if someone tells you 7 per cent-- and I'm separating the word so it makes a little more sense-- they're really saying 7 per 100. This is the same thing as 7 per 100, which is the same thing as a fraction as 7 per 7 per 100. With that out of the way, let's see if we can write 0.601 as a percentage. Well, we essentially want to write it as something over 100. So you could view it as-- I'll just rewrite this part right over here. You could write it as 0.601 over 1. This is obviously the same quantity. If you divide anything by 1, you're still going to get that same anything. And I'm going to multiply it by 100 over 100. Obviously, this won't change the value. This is just 1 here. But what this does is it'll give us a fraction in term with the denominator being 100. So the denominator, if I multiply these two characters right over here in the denominator, the denominator of our product is going to be 100. If I multiply 0.0601 times 100, what am I going to get? Well, every time I multiply it by a multiple of 10 or every time I multiply it by 10, I'm going to shift the decimal over to the right once. So if I multiply it by 10, I'd get 6.01. And if I multiply it by a 10 again or if I multiply it by 100, I'm going to get 60.1. So 0.601 times 100 is 60.1. Let me rewrite that again. If I were to write 0.601, and I want to multiply it by 100, shift the decimal once, I multiply it by 10. If I multiply it by 10 again, or essentially multiply it by 100, I get 60.1. So this is times 10. This is times 10 again. I've essentially multiplied it by 100. But now we have it in the form we like. We have 60.1 over 100. Or you could rewrite this. This is the same thing as 60.1 per 100, which is the same thing as 60.1 percent. And we'd obviously want to write it then as 60.1 percent, as one word, or 60.1, and we'll just use the symbol-- 60.1%. We are done.