What is the difference between fraction decimal and percent?

Answer 1

Fractions, decimals and percents are all different ways of representing numbers that may be "partial numbers" (non whole numbers) or may be whole numbers.

A fraction is a written form of division.

For example, 1/3 is one divided by three, or .3 repeating.

An example of how it can be a whole number is 6/3. Whereas that is considered an improper fraction, it still is a fraction that equals two.

A decimal is a representation using a decimal point to separate the whole numbers from the "partial numbers".

An example is 1.25. This separates the whole number, one from the partial number "twenty five hundredths" (can also just be said "point two five")

An example of a whole number could be 5.0 which is equal to 5

A percent is the same as a decimal except the separator is moved right by two places. Moving the decimal right two places is the same as dividing it by one hundred and that is where the name percent came from. "per" meaning "one part in every", and "cent" meaning hundred. We notify the reader that we are using percent by affixing the percent symbol (%) to the end of the statement.

An example is 75% , read "Seventy-five percent" which is the same as 75/100 or 0.75

An example of a whole number could be 200%, which is equal to 2.

Generally whether you choose fraction, decimal or percent to represent your data is going to depend on the context. There are some exceptions however with fractions as fractions can represent data that the other two methods have a lot of trouble with such as repeating numbers, or numbers that would have many decimal places.