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Chapter 6  Percents

6-1 Introduction to Percents

• What does percent mean?  One clue is the fact that centum is the Latin word for hundred. So when we say "20 percent," we mean 20 per 100, or 20 out of a hundred.
• How much is 25 cents? There's that word again—centum. Twenty-five cents is 25 parts of a hundred cents, or one dollar.

Everything that is expressed in percent is related to 100. And values that are expressed in percent are labeled with the percent sign, %.

A percentage indicates the number of parts in 100.   For example, if 40 out of a hundred cars are colored white, you can say that 40 percent (written as 40%) of cars are painted white.

More Examples

6% = six out of a hundred

87% = 87 out of a hundred

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