Hudson Smith

FIN 1380
7/27/2015

I would like to take some time and talk about the concepts of numbers, fractions,
decimals, and percentages. These topics all play a part in our everyday lives; from the
cost of groceries and services, to how we determine future events and trends in data.
Numbers are a fixture in our lives that help us to describe situations, and explain the
importance of something through numerical values.
To begin, a simple whole number is a number that has no fractions or decimals
that are connected to it. This does not mean that they can tell you very much alone. A 3
or an 8 sitting on a blank page will have little meaning to anybody, but when you couple
those numbers with a word or two, such as, 3 bananas, or, 8 eggs, we are then able to
determine that there is value in the information weve been given. We use numbers in
our grocery lists at home, to count people in a congregation at a church, even to tell how
much monetary worth a person or business has. This is a very basic part of our everyday
life and I would think that most people take it for granted that we are able to use
numbers to keep track of items in our everyday lives.
Now fractions and decimals are very closely related to one another. They are used
to give value to something that is only a partial amount of a whole number; or more
accurately, only a portion of the number 1. Not everything in our world comes in whole
numbers. In fact, more often than not, they come in fractions or decimals and this
especially applies to our currency. Ones paycheck very rarely comes out to be an even
dollar amount without any extra change or cent amount being involved. And for a
business, daily sales or a bill for services seldom comes out to equal a dollar amount
without any cents. This shows everyday use of decimals; however fractions are more
obscure perhaps. You may hear an intercom in the super market where a store clerk will
announce, half of Darigold gallons of milk! This, to most people means, Oh cool! Two
dollars off milk, but what they dont realize is that they actually used the phrase half
off in place of a . An even simpler way to think of fractions is this; say you have
seventeen employees at your small business, and on any given day you want to see how
many have come to work that day. You would take the number of people who showed
up, for instance fourteen, and you would make that into a fraction with the total number
of employees, so 14/17 employees came to work in this situation.
Percentages fall into an in-between of sorts to decimals and fractions. You can
view a percentage as a fraction where the denominator is 100 and the divisor is the
number of the percent. Inversely it can be seen as a decimal where you move the
decimal point on the percentage two positions to the left to create a decimal number.
Retailers use this namely for sales; Up to 75% off, or 25% off when you buy 4. While
useful in a business setting, the uses of fractions in a household are fewer. I believe the
largest use of percentages at home is to determine how well ones child, or self, did on a
school assignment or test which are generally graded using a percentage, and your total
grade for said class; A, B, etc. are all based on percentages.

Hudson Smith
FIN 1380
7/27/2015

These concepts follow us every direction that we turn in our society today. The
one who says we dont use such math in everyday life is a fool. Not only do we see it in
our businesses and retailers, these numbers show up in our personal lives whether we
realize we are seeing and even using them ourselves. They are an important part of our
everyday lives and they always will be.