Interesting Percentages

Hmmm...there seems to be something drastically wrong with the math here.
No wonder we can't see any shoppers in the carpark!

This post is about some of the interesting percents we found while searching the web to create an assignment sheet for one of our Mathematics classes. (The final assignment and answers are contained later in this post).

Here is a nice little PowerPoint from Slideshare by Natalie Hughes, that gives a great overview of Percentages.

Fractions Decimals And Percents

View more presentations from Natalie Hughes.

Percentages are a very important part of our modern world. They are used in Economics, Cooking, Health, Sport, Mathematics, Science, Jewellery, Geography, Health and Exercise, Medicine, and many other areas.

Percents add a common understandable meaning to results. For example, saying that 25% of drivers breath tested had been drinking, (which means 1 in 4 drivers), is a lot easier to understand than saying 241 out of 967 drivers were drinking.


Image Source: http://www.tundraheadquarters.com


Interesting Percentages

• A jellyfish is 95 percent water.

• More than 50% of the people in the world have never made or received a telephone call.

• Only 55 percent of all Americans know that the sun is a star.

• About 70 percent of Americans who go to college do it to make more money.

• 44% of kids watch television before they go to sleep.

• 70 percent of an adult's body is made up of water.

• There are some ice creams that are 75% air.

Image Source: http://www.watchmojo.com

Now eating all that ice cream is sure going to taste good, but what about the subsequent unhealthy weight gain ?


Body Fat Percentage

A basic "Skin Pull Caliper Test" along with a lookup table can enable you to quickly determine your "Body Fat Percentage".

A Great Body Fat Percentage and Weighing Yourself explanatory video by the legendary Darin Steen is this one:



Here are some body fat percentage guidelines for men and women:


Image Source: http://www.calculatebodyfatpercentage.com

Q. Why is the healthy body fat percentage for women always higher than that for men ?

A. Women require more body fat for Child Bearing purposes.


So to get rid of that unhealthy fat build up, we are going to need to do some regular exercise that raises our heart rate up to a level where we can burn off some fat.


Heart Rate Percentages

There is actually a certain speed we are supposed to get our heart up to, for exercise to be beneficial.

This heart rate is often called our "Training Heart Rate", or "Target Heart Rate".

The basic mathematics behind this is that your Maximum Heart Rate (MHR) is 220 minus your age.

You then need to do your workout at below this rate at a "Target Heart Rate" that is a certain % of your MHR.


Image Source: http://www.healthgoods.com

Find out a whole lot more about healthy weight mathematics at this previous Passy World blog post:

The Mathematics of Being Healthy


Percentages in Jewelery

There are an endless number of interesting percentages on the web.

Did you know for example that:

"14 carat gold" = 58.33% Gold, 14% to 28% Copper, and 4% to 28% Silver

and

"White Gold" = 75 to 85% Gold, 8 to 10% Nickel, and 2 to 9% Zinc.


Image Source: http://2.bp.blogspot.com

Here are some percentage statistics about Pornography on the Internet:

• 25% of total search engine requests are porn-related. (Top three searches: sex, mp3 and hotmail.)

• 8% of total emails are porn-related. Average daily pornographic emails are 4.5 per internet user.

• 12% of total websites are pornographic.
  
  

There is definitely a lot of kinky stuff going on with a certain percentage of Internet users:


Image Source: http://gawkerassets.com

And here is a final slideshow. It is all about percentage increases in wages - wouldn't we all like to see a bit more of that in the real world!

Consumer Math Slides October 25, 2007

View more presentations from Darren Kuropatwa.

Here is a worksheet that involves internet research by students to investigate a number of interesting percentages:

If you would like to have your own full size copy of this PDF, then simply click the save disk icon button on the PDF viewer, and you should be able to save it to your own hard disk.

Alternatively, you can view or save the full size PDF by clicking the link below:

Click here to open or save the “Percents Assignment” PDF

And you can also click the link below if you would like to see the Answers to the assignment:

Click here for the “Percents Assignment Answers”

So that's us about 99% done here, and we hope that you have yourself a 100% day today.

Enjoy,
Big Passy Wasabi