Re: Expressing fractions

From: Herb Martin (news_at_LearnQuick.com)
Date: 12/26/04 

Date: Sun, 26 Dec 2004 22:12:32 GMT

"Juuitchan" <juuitchan@hotmail.com> wrote in message
news:1104097841.287332.3850@f14g2000cwb.googlegroups.com...
> 1) In English, how do you read aloud expressions such as "0.65 m"?
>
> 2) In English, these are valid:
> Three-quarters of my employees are women.
> Seventy-five percent of my employees are women.
> but this is not valid:
> Point seven five of my employees are women.
>
> One of my pet peeves is percentages. I hate percentages. To me they are
> so confusing that they might well have been designed by Satan himself.

Percentages are just another way of expressing a fraction
and usually more clear than using odd denominators like
13/16s or 29/33s.

> For example, a 30% decrease followed by a 30% increase is equivalent to
> a 9% decrease.

Must of this confusions is due to the common mistakes
made by the SOURCES of such information, or at least
by those reporting on those sources.

Couple that with your own misunderstanding (or lack of
explicity understanding) that such increase/decrease
reports are based on the CURRENT amount, not the orginal
amount and then it is a bit more obvious that after multiple
percentage increases and decreases from the current
amount, a direct comparison with the original is not going
to be obvious.

> However, they seem embedded in the English language as
> in "X% discount", "X% interest" (incidentally, interest is calculated
> using a dishonest algorithm involving division where taking a root is
> what is required),

Which is the reason that some years ago the US (at least)
made a law requiring standardized interest rate advertising.

> and also the examples I gave above. Are there
> languages in which percentages do not have this status?

Not if they have salesmen.

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