Working out percentages may seem complicated at first, but it’s easy once you know how.

To show you how to do this, we’re going to use an example question:

A class with 30 children voted on what activity they wanted to do next. 18 children wanted to draw, and 12 children wanted to paint. What percentage of children wanted to paint?

We know that 12 children out of 30 wanted to paint. So, how do we turn that into a percentage? Well, we need to do two things:

  1. We need to divide 12 (the number of children that wanted to paint) by 30 (the total class size.) The answer to this is 0.4.
  2. To turn it into a percentage, we need to multiply it by 100. The answer to this is 40.

So, the answer to this question is 40%.

Now you try

Or you can download a printable worksheet here and the answers here.