Amounts, Percents, and Bases of Percent Problems

Amounts, Percents, and Bases of Percent Problems In early mathematics, students come to understand percents as an amount of the base sum of an item, but the term per cent simply means per hundred, so it can be interpreted  as a portion out of 100, including fractions and sometimes numbers higher than 100. In percent problems in mathematics assignments and examples, students are often asked to identify the three core parts of the problem- the amount, the percent, and the base- wherein the amount is the number taken out of the base by being reduced by a certain percentage. The percent symbol is read twenty-five percent and simply means 25 out of 100. It is useful to be able to understand that a percent can be converted to a fraction and a decimal, meaning that 25 percent can also mean 25 over 100 which can be reduced to 1 over 4 and 0.25 when written as a decimal. Practical Uses of Percentage Problems Percentages may be the most useful tool of early mathematics education for adult life, especially when you consider that every mall has 15 percent off and half off sales to entice shoppers to purchase their wares. As a result, its critical for young students to grasp the concepts of calculating the amount reduced if they take a percentage away from of a base. Imagine youre planning a trip to Hawaii with you and a loved one, and have a coupon thats only valid for the off-season of travel but guarantees 50 percent off the ticket price. On the other hand, you and your loved one can travel during the busy season and really experience the island life, but you can only find 30 percent discounts on those tickets. If the off-season tickets cost $1295 and the on-season tickets cost $695 before applying the coupons, which would be the better deal? Based on the on-season tickets being reduced by 30 percent (208), the final total cost would be 487 (rounded up) while the cost for the off-season, being reduced by 50 percent (647), would cost 648 (rounded up). In this case, the marketing team probably expected people would jump at the half-off deal and not research deals for a time when people want to travel out to Hawaii the most. As a result, some people wind up paying more for a worse time to fly! Other Everyday Percent Problems Percents occur almost as frequently as simple addition and subtraction in everyday life, from calculating the appropriate tip to leave at a restaurant to calculating gains and losses in recent months. People who work on commission  often get around 10 to 15 percent of the value of the sale they made for a company, so a cars salesman who sells a one hundred thousand dollar car would get between ten and fifteen thousand dollars in commission from his sale. Similarly, those who save a portion of their salary for paying insurance and government taxes, or wish to dedicate part of their earnings to a savings account, must determine which percentage of their gross income they want to divest to these different investments.

Mexico CitysTlatelolco Massacre

Mexico City'sTlatelolco Massacre One of the ugliest and most tragic incidents in the modern history of Latin America took place on Oct. 2, 1968, when hundreds of unarmed Mexicans, most of them student protesters, were gunned down by government police and Mexican army forces in a gruesome bloodbath that still haunts Mexicans. Background For months preceding the incident, protesters, again most of them students, had been taking to the streets to bring the attention of the world to Mexicos repressive government, led by President Gustavo Diaz Ordaz. The protesters were demanding autonomy for universities, the firing of the police chief and the release of political prisoners. Dà ­az Ordaz, in an effort to stop the protests, had ordered the occupation of the National Autonomous University of Mexico, the countrys largest university, in Mexico City. Student protesters saw the upcoming 1968 Summer Olympics, to be held in Mexico City, as the perfect way to bring their issues to a worldwide audience. The Tlatelolco Massacre   On the day of Oct.2, thousands of students marched throughout the capital, and around nightfall, about 5,000 of them congregated at La Plaza de Las Tres Culturas in the district of Tlatelolco for what was expected to be another peaceful rally. But armored cars and tanks quickly surrounded the plaza, and the police began firing into the crowd. Estimates of casualties vary from the official line of four dead and 20 wounded into the thousands, although most historians place the number of casualties somewhere between 200 and 300. Some of the protesters managed to get away, while others took refuge in homes and apartments surrounding the square. A door-to-door search by authorities yielded some of these protesters. Not all of the victims of the Tlatelolco Massacre were protesters; many were simply passing through and in the wrong place at the wrong time. The Mexican government immediately claimed that security forces had been fired upon first and that they were only shooting in self-defense. Whether the security forces fired first or the protesters incited the violence is a question that remains unanswered decades later. Lingering Effects In recent years, however, changes in government have made it possible for a closer look into the reality of the massacre. The then-minister of the interior, Luà ­s Echeverrà ­a Alvarez, was indicted on genocide charges in 2005 in connection with the incident, but the case was later thrown out. Movies and books about the incident have come out, and interest is high in Mexicos Tiananmen Square. Today, its still a powerful subject in Mexican life and politics, and many Mexicans see it as the beginning of the end for the dominant political party, PRI, and also the day the Mexican people stopped trusting their government.