Percentages Made Simple A short tutorial on how to work out percentages

For instance, a friend of mine has called me a few times asking, "if something costs 45 euros after a 20% discount, how much did it cost before the deal?" or "if I buy something for 25 euros, how much VAT do I pay?" etc.
Not only adults have difficulty calculating percentages, but also young children who have been taught them at school relatively recently.
I'll try to make things as straightforward as possible in this small book. After all, working out percentages isn't rocket science!
Every day we see headlines like "50% off sale this week" or "the unemployment rate in Greece has risen to 21%" or "our income has dropped 35%, because of the austerity measures, since 2010" or "there's 15% chance of rain today" etc.
Percentages play an essential part in our lives, and learning how to operate them is vital.
The symbol '%' reads "per cent", which is short for the Latin phrase "per centum" and means "in every hundred". The words "century", "centennial", "centigrade", "centimetre" etc. have the same stem centi-
Simply speaking, a percentage is a fraction that has a denominator of 100.
In this booklet, you'll learn how to: convert decimals and fractions into percentages and vice versa, find what per cent of a quantity is another quantity, find a percentage of a quantity, find an amount when you know a portion of it, increase or decrease an amount by a percentage, find a percentage change, find the value of an amount before a percentage increase or decrease.
Hopefully, after reading this booklet, you'll be confident in calculating percentages.