# Finding a percent

CCSS Math: 6.RP.A.3c

## Video transcript

Let's give ourselves a little bit of practice with percentages. So let's ask ourselves, what percent of-- I don't know, let's say what percent of 16 is 4? And I encourage you to pause this video and to try it out yourself. So when you're saying what percent of 16 is 4, percent is another way of saying, what fraction of 16 is 4? And we just need to write it as a percent, as per 100. So if you said what fraction of 16 is 4, you would say, well, look, this is the same thing as 4/16, which is the same thing as 1/4. But this is saying what fraction 4 is of 16. You'd say, well, 4 is 1/4 of 16. But that still doesn't answer our question. What percent? So in order to write this as a percent, we literally have to write it as something over 100. Percent literally means "per cent." The word "cent" you know from cents and century. It relates to the number 100. So it's per 100. So you could say, well, this is going to be equal to question mark over 100, the part of 100. And there's a bunch of ways that you could think about this. You could say, well, look, if in the denominator to go from 4 to 100, I have to multiply by 25. In the numerator to go from-- I need to also multiply by 25 in order to have an equivalent fraction. So I'm also going to multiply by 25. So 1/4 is the same thing as 25/100. And another way of saying 25/100 is this is 25 per 100, or 25%. So this is equal to 25%. Now, there's a couple of other ways you could have thought about it. You could have said well, 4/16, this is literally 4 divided by 16. Well, let me just do the division and convert to a decimal, which is very easy to convert to a percentage. So let's try to actually do this division right over here. So we're going to literally divide 4 by 16. Now, 16 goes into 4 zero times. 0 times 16 is 0. You subtract, and you get a 4. And we're not satisfied just having this remainder. We want to keep adding zeroes to get a decimal answer right over here. So let's put a decimal right over here. We're going into the tenths place. And let's throw some zeroes right over here. The decimal makes sure we keep track of the fact that we are now in the tenths, and in the hundredths, and in the thousandths place if we have to go that far. But let's bring another 0 down. 16 goes into 40 two times. 2 times 16 is 32. If you subtract, you get 8. And you could bring down another 0. And we have 16 goes into 80. Let's see, 16 goes into 80 five times. 5 times 16 is 80. You subtract, you have no remainder, and you're done. 4/16 is the same thing as 0.25. Now, 0.25 is the same thing as twenty-five hundredths. Or, this is the same thing as 25/100, which is the same thing as 25%.