Why Is It Lovely

This page has been: Tagged As Education Tagged As Maths Recently on one of my "social network feeds" I saw a post saying: X% of Y equals Y% of X. There were already several comments with people expressing various reactions, so I idly commented as follows: 1% of 100 is 1, by definition. So 2% of 100 is 2, 3% of 100 is 3, and 4% of 100 is 4. Halve things, so we have 4% of 50 is 2. The general formula can be derived, that X% of Y is (X*Y)/100. But that's equal to (Y*X)/100, which is Y% of X, and there's your result. For those of us who did maths this is obvious, but for those for whom maths was just a list of formulas and processes, applied without any real understanding, I can see that this can come as a surprise. It's genuinely a lovely thing, and occasionally useful. Just to be clear - this is a heavily edited and anonymised account of a discussion that happened in a closed group. Someone engaged with my response, and after some considerable back and forth I ended up writing a few rat ... Read full article.