Approaching Percents with Proportions

Monday, December 03, 2012 9:57 AM

1) Write a proportion you could use to solve the following problem. Be sure to include the units. 16 cookies require 1.5 cups of flour. How many cups of flour would 20 cookies require?

2) Rewrite the proportion with ONLY the units.

3) Explain how the units in a proportion are essential when setting up a proportion.

4) What does percent mean?

5) Write 30% as a fraction.

6) What is the denominator of any percent written as a fraction?

7) Think of percent as part of a whole. What number would represent the whole?

8) If I have a bowl of apples and 50 out of 120 are red apples, what is the part and what is the whole in this situation?

9) Set up a proportion to figure out what percent of the apples in the previous question are red and solve.

10) Use the units in the previous problem to create a formula for working with percents.

11) Use your formula to answer the following question: 150 out of 720 students at Cary Academy have been in the All About Animals club. What percent of students, rounded to the nearest whole, have been in the All About Animals club?

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11) Use your formula to answer the following question: 150 out of 720 students at Cary Academy have been in the All About Animals club. What percent of students, rounded to the nearest whole, have been in the All About Animals club?

12) Make up a word problem that can be solved with your formula and apply the formula to your word problem.

1) Translate each of the following. Four less than the product of a number and twelve is eighteen. Three groups of a number is twelve. Five more than the product of a number and six is twelve less than the same number. 2) Now, apply the skill of translating expressions and equations to working with percents. Translate each of the following.
Eighteen percent of sixty

Thirty percent of one hundred is thirty.

Five percent of twenty is one.

Translate and solve each of the following. Round to the tenths if necessary.

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Nine percent of sixteen is some number.

Ten percent of what number is eighty.

What percent of fifteen is 3?

Come up with a formula for solving percent problems with an equation.

Apply your equation formula and your proportion formula to the following problems. You should get the same answer for both.

24% of students made a C on their last test. If there are 84 students taking the same test, how many made a C?

What percent of dogs are black if eight out of fifteen are black?

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73% of the cars on the road are silver. If 425 cars are silver, how many cars are on the road?

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