Find Percentages of an Amount Using a Multiplier

So, you want to buy that sports car?

Well, that requires quite a lot of saving up!  

You'll need to start putting some money away from that part-time job of yours.

You can't save it all as you want some money for other things, so the best thing to do is to save a percentage of your earnings.

Remember, percent just means out of 100, so 100% means the full amount.  

This month you've been paid £320 and you can afford to save 25% of this.

Grab your calculator: input 320 and multiply by this by 0.25.

Did you get £80?    

0.25 means we do not want to find the whole amount, hence the zero.

We just want 25% of the whole (which is 1).

This works for any percentage, let's take a look:

10% of 625 = 625 × 0.10 =  62.50

15% of 328 = 15 × 0.15 = 49.40

53% of 497  = 497 × 0.53 = 263.41      

Take note:

When finding a percentage that is less than 10, you can use multipliers such as 1% = 0.01,  2% = 0.02, 3% = 0.03, etc.

When finding a percentage that is over 10, such as 17.5%, you should use the multiplier 0.175.

In this activity, we will find percentages of amounts by multiplying using a decimal. 

You will want to have a calculator handy to help you, as these questions are designed to test your understanding of this process, not your mental maths.