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Percentages are ratios, meaning they represent parts of a whole. The word "cent" comes from the Latin word "centum" which means "hundred," so when we say "per_cent", we actually mean per one hundred. For example, five percent, written as 5% is five per, or "out of", one hundred. Another way to express the ratio is as a fraction, in this case, $$5/100$$, which can be turned into a percentage by dividing the part by the whole. Dividing $$5/100$$ would give us 0.05 or 5%. Percentages can also be bigger than the whole. For example, 120 percent (120%) is 120 out of a hundred.

But what about when we want to figure out the exact number that a percentage represents? For example, if we know that 5% of the students in our class got A's on a test and we know that there are twenty students in the class, how do we figure out how many students in the class got A's? Our first clue is that there are a total of twenty students in the class, meaning twenty is equal to 100%. If 5% is equal to $$5/100$$ and we are looking for 5% of twenty, then we can simply multiply $$5/100$$ by twenty to get the answer, one. So, one student in the class got an A on their test. It is worth noting that we could have also gotten the result by first converting $$5/100$$ to a decimal, by dividing five by one-hundred and multiplying the result, 0.05, by twenty.