Name: How to Calculate Percentages [The Simple Way]
Uploaded: 2025-07-21T18:21:34.000Z
Duration: 3 min 47 s
Description: Thousands of YouTube videos with English-Chinese subtitles! Now you can learn to understand native speakers, expand your vocabulary, and improve your pronunciation...

To find 10% of something, multiply by 0.1.

To add 10% to something, multiply by 1.1.

To deduct 10% from something, multiply by 0.9.

And if you want to find out what's 70% of 20, all you need to do is eliminate and multiply.

In this video, you'll learn why when you see percentages, you should think of fractions.

The word percent comes from Latin and means per hundred.

If you have a basket with 100 apples and take out the 7 rotten ones, that's 7 per hundred.

And if you instead want to estimate the rotten ones out of 300 apples, multiply 7 by 3, which is 21.

Understanding percentages as part of 100 is good.

Even better is seeing percentages as a fraction of 1, like part of one pile or a slice of a whole pizza.

That's because 25% is a quarter of 1, 50% is half of 1, 100% is 1.

Instead, they used a flipped version of it, which evolved from writing percento and looked a lot like a division sign, which made sense.

When you see, for instance, 25%, picture part over whole, which is equivalent to a quarter or 0.25.

In the low season, 50% of rooms are booked.

On New Year's Eve, all 100 rooms are reserved.

Now business is booming and you want to increase capacity by 20%.

This is because 1 plus 0.2 of that 1 is 1.2.

To add 20% to something, you take your whole, multiply it by 1.2 and solve your equation, which in this case gives you 20 rooms on top.

Now say you want to expand again, this time by 25%.

So you take your 120 rooms and multiply them by 1.25 to add the part you want to increase it by.

The result is 150 or 30 rooms on top of your whole.

Only half of your hotel is booked and you want to downsize by 40%.

You take your whole and deduct 0.4, which gives you the figure you used to multiply your whole with.

Or put differently, to deduct 40%, you take the whole, multiply it by 0.6 and solve your equation, which in this case leaves you with 90 rooms for your hotel and 60 you could turn into an office.

And if you ever forget how percentages work, flip the symbol back sideways. 10% is 10 over 100, which is 0.1.

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Subtitles ListPlay Video

How to Calculate Percentages [The Simple Way]

equivalent

figure

eliminate

crisis