Need some help with this math question (question in the description)

Question

logan surveyed his class. he found out that 0.32 of his class owned cats. 2/3 oened dogs, and 25% owned fish. which type of pet was owned by the greatest percent of students

Answer 1

So what you will need to do here is change all of the numbers into the same form (since cats are in decimals (.32), dogs are in fractions (2/3), and fish are in percentages (25%) - so you can choose which form is easier for you to convert. In this example, I will use different strategies to explain.

First step, I would say, is to change 2/3 dogs into a decimal by using division When dividing fractions, you want to divide the denominator (bottom number) into the numerator (top number) - so 2 divided by 3 (how many times can 3 go into 2). That comes out to about .67 for dogs

Next step, you can already start to eliminate your answers by comparing dogs (.67) to cats (.32). As you can see, .67 is greater than .32, so we already can tell that more students have dogs than cats, so we can eliminate cats as the answer.

Next step would be to compare dogs (.67) to fish (25%). When converting a decimal into a percentage, all you need to do is move the decimal point over to the right 2 times. So .67 moved once would be 6.7, and then moved again would be 67.%

Then, you can compare 67% for dogs to 25% for fish, and we can see that 67 is bigger than 25:

So the answer is dogs are owned by the greatest percentage of students.

Answer 2

Addison, have you heard the idea that we can only compare apples to apples and not apples to oranges?

You have an apples-and-oranges problem here. You need to compare it to an apples-to-apples problem so that you can answer the question. The point is, you need to have the various amounts expressed in LIKE UNITS or FORMS so that you can compare them. As it is, you have one percentage, one fraction, and one decimal.

You can change them all to percentages, all to fractions, or all to decimals. Then, it would be simply to pick the largest, regardless of the fact that they asked which has the greatest percentage. The greatest fraction pet will be the same as the greatest decimal pet, which will be the same as the greatest percentage pet, so to speak. I'll pick to convert the amounts to percentages, but that's a random choice.

So, 0.32 of Logan's class have cats. That means 32/100, right? Well, percentage means the number of hundredTHs, so 32% of Logan's class have cats.

Dogs are owned by 2/3 of Logan's class. To find 2/3 as a percentage, you begin by looking at 2/3 as a division problem, 2 divided by 3. Perform the division by long division or by using a calculator to get the decimal, 0.667, rounded to the nearest thousandTH. This is 667/1000 or 66.7/100. Since percentage is the number of hundredTHs, 66.7% of Logan's class owns dogs.

Fish are owned by 25% of Logan's class. No work for us to do here.

Can you now determine which pet is owned by the largest number of students in Logan's class?

NOTE: The percentages exceed 100% when added, because some students have more than one pet.