Today, I was just messing around and wanted to figure out a quick way to calculate percentages. You know, those times when you’re like, “What’s 10% of 20?” and your brain just freezes? Yeah, that happened.
The Super Simple Way
So, I remembered this super simple trick. It’s all about turning the percentage into a decimal and then just multiplying.
First, I took the percentage, which is 10 in this case.
Then, I thought, “Okay, 10% as a decimal is 0.10”. You just move the decimal point two places to the left. Easy peasy.
Next, I grabbed the number I wanted to find the percentage of, which was 20.
Finally, I just multiplied 0.10 by 20.
- Took 10%
- Converted to decimal: 0.10
- Multiplied 0.10 20
And guess what? It’s 2! I double-checked it, and yup, 10% of 20 is definitely 2.
Why This Works (Without Getting Too Math-y)
Basically, when you find a percentage of something, you’re finding a part of that something. A percentage is just a fraction out of 100. So, 10% is the same as 10/100, which simplifies to 1/10. And multiplying something by 1/10 is the same as dividing it by 10 (or multiplying by 0.1, in this way, is easy too!).
It’s so easy, that I should not use calculator next time.