Working Up

by Dwayne Phillips

A review of percent may surprise some. Sorry about that. Use this information cautiously.

I recently read a contract that purported to calculate 50% of 50%. That struck me as odd, so given too much time on my hands, I thought about it a while.

Warning: thinking about basic things for a while can reveal information that makes people mad at you.

Going back to the word problems we used to do back when we scratched on the walls of caves with rocks… the word “of” translated to “multiply something.” For example, “a tenth of the cost” meant we multiplied 0.1 and the cost.

Let’s go back to 50% of 50%. That translates to multiplying 50% and 50%. The answer is 2,500 percent squared. No, wait a minute. Half of 50% is 25%. Everyone knows that. What is is this 2,500 stuff?

I go back to the basics (here is where people become mad at me). 50% is not a half. 50% is a half (0.5 for us decimal point folks) times 100%. That’s how we go from 0.5 to 50%.

This leads us to things like:

• 25% is not a quarter, it is a quarter times 100%.
• 10% is not a tenth, it is a tenth times 100%.
• 75% is not three quarters, it is three quarters times 100%.

But everyone knows that 50% is a half, 25% is a quarter, and so on. I told you this would make people mad at you. And everyone knows that 50% of 50% is 25% or a quarter. So, Mr. smarty pants (as my mother would tell me), stop all this.

This is often what happens when I think about basic things. It seems like folks today don’t like to consider basic things. I guess I was always in the 1% of the 1% in the strange-folks list. ooops, 1% of 1% is 1 percent squared which has no meaning which…