10% of ten English pounds £

Question

I, unfortunately, have serious dyscalculia and struggle with maths. This makes figuring out simple everyday maths quite difficult. I'd really appreciate the help with this. Thanks in advance.

Answer 1

Ten percent is one-tenth, or one in ten. (This is equivalent to $10/100$, or $10$ per $100$, as JMoravitz pointed out above.)

So, if you have $10$ pounds, one in ten of them is $1$ pound.

Similarly, $10\%$ of $50$ pounds would also be one for every ten, or $5$ pounds.

Graphically, you can arrange the pounds in rows of $10$ and take just the first one of each row.

Fractions are a little tougher. After you take the first one from every full row of ten, then you'll need to break up each pound into $10$ pieces, line those up into rows, and take the first piece from each row.

So for $46$ pounds: You have $4$ full rows. There are six left over.

So line up the $6 \times 10$ pieces into six rows of ten, and take the first piece from each row: $6$ tenths.

Then, $10\%$ of $46$ pounds is $4 \frac{6}{10} = 4.6$ pounds.

Hope that helps.

Answer 2

A friendly reminder, "%" is read as "percent." The word percent when broken down in etymology is "per cent." Cent in this context comes from latin meaning One hundred. You can see it used in other words such as Century (100 years), Centurion (a commander in charge of 100 soldiers), and others. Per in this context means "for each". So, percent means "for each hundred"

So, 10 percent means linguistically as 10 out of 100. Similarly 50 percent means 50 out of 100. 1 percent means 1 out of 100.

For how to use that information to complete, I refer you to John's answer above as he already did a fine job of explaining it. I just figured you may want to relate this mathematical concept to a linguistic one instead to have it more firmly rooted.