Okay, so I was messing around with some numbers today and wanted to figure out a quick way to calculate percentages. Nothing fancy, just a simple “10 percent of 100” type of thing. I figured I’d jot down my process, ’cause why not? Maybe it’ll help someone else out there, or maybe I’ll forget how I did it next week and need to look it up myself!
My Little Experiment
First, I grabbed a piece of paper and a pen. Yeah, I’m old school like that sometimes. I could have used a calculator or a spreadsheet, but I like the feel of scribbling things down.
I wrote down “10% of 100”. The “of” part always trips me up a little. Does it mean add, subtract, multiply…what?
Then I remembered something from way back in school. “Percent” means “out of one hundred”. So, 10% is the same as 10/100. That made things a bit clearer.
Next, I recalled that “of” in these kinds of problems usually means multiply. It is multiply!
So, I rewrote my problem as: (10/100) 100.
Now, this looked much easier to deal with. I could see that the two 100s would cancel each other out. One’s on the top, one’s on the bottom. Boom, they’re gone.
That left me with just…10. Seriously? All that for just 10? It can’t be.
I double-checked my scribbles. Yup, everything looked right. I even did it backwards in my head: If 10 is 10% of 100, then 20 would be 20%, 30 would be 30%…all the way up to 100 being 100%. It made sense!
I can use calculator to chek it. And I did it, it is 10.
The Big Reveal
So, there you have it. 10 percent of 100 is 10. I know, it’s not rocket science, but it’s satisfying to work through it and see how it all clicks together. Sometimes the simplest things are the most interesting to break down.
