Whole, half, quarter, fifth and tenth

You have probably heard the word percent. But what is a percent? And how do you use it? You make a quilt from square pieces of cloth. Your quilt is 10 by 10 squares, 100 identical squares in total.

Since blue is your favorite color, you make half of the squares in different shades of blue. For one quarter of the squares you choose different shades of red, and the remaining squares are in different shades of green. Since there are one hundred squares in total in the quilt, one square makes one hundredth of the whole quilt. One out of one hundred squares, or one hundredth, can be written as one percent. The term percent is derived from the Latin per centum, meaning for each hundred.

The entire quilt, 100 squares, is 100 percent. A hundred percent means whole thing. Half of the quilt, the blue squares, or 50 out of 100, is 50 percent. 50 percent means half. One quarter of the quilt, the red or the green squares, 25 squares out of 100, is twenty five percent.

25 percent means one quarter. A tenth of the quilt, or one row, is 10 out of 100. That’s ten percent. Ten percent means one tenth. If we add another row of ten squares, we have 20 out of 100 squares, or twenty percent.

Twenty percent means one fifth. Here you can see some relationships that are useful to learn by heart. Pause the film, write them down and practice!