Re: Expressing fractions

From: Jim Beck (jbeck4_at_nyc.rr.com)
Date: 12/26/04 

Date: Sun, 26 Dec 2004 22:36:08 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"?

zero-point-six-five meters
point-six-five meters
spot-six-five meters

>
> 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.

If you said it that way, people would probably understand it. It sounds
awkward, though.

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

A world in which such a useful idea is a pet peeve is a bizarre and
marvelous place.

> However, they seem embedded in the English language as
> in "X% discount",

Some things are easier to calculate than others. Most people can
calculate 10% of something more readily than 90% of something.

> "X% interest" (incidentally, interest is calculated
> using a dishonest algorithm involving division where taking a root is
> what is required), and also the examples I gave above.

No. The Annual Percentage Rate (APR) and some other approximations are
reported that way. "Interest" is not calculated in that way. Several
approximate interest calculations are still in use today. They were
developed to make it easier to figure things out on the fly.

Are there
> languages in which percentages do not have this status?

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