Percentages
- Course
- Problem-Solving and Data Analysis
- Question type
- Percentages
- Practice
- 6 practice questions
- Language
- Vietnamese · English
About this lesson
Percentages on the SAT: percent of a number, percent increase and decrease, multipliers for successive changes, finding the original value after a change, percent of a percent, and percentage points.
On the Digital SAT, percentages are their own skill in the Problem-Solving and Data Analysis domain. The questions are usually about prices, discounts, taxes, populations or survey results: a percent of a number, the size of an increase or decrease, the price before a sale, or a comparison of two rates from groups of different sizes.
The arithmetic is easy, so lost points almost always come from setting up the wrong operation: dividing by the new value instead of the old one, adding the percents of two successive changes, or recovering an original price by adding the percent back on. This lesson reduces every question to a multiplier, shows when to pick 100 as a starting value, and how to check an answer backward in seconds. It ends with 6 self-graded practice questions, each with a full explanation.
What you'll learn
- Turn every percent question into one multiplication or division by a multiplier.
- Find percent increase and decrease by always dividing by the original value.
- Handle successive changes and recover an original price after a discount.
- Separate percent change from percentage points when comparing two rates.
Lesson contents
- Lesson goals
- 1. A percent is a multiplication
- Key terms
- Translating words into math
- 2. Increases, decreases and multipliers
- Percent increase and decrease
- 3. Finding the original value
- 4. Percent of a percent
- 5. Common traps
- 6. Speed strategies
This lesson is part of HOCSAT Learn
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