Expressing Percentages & Fractions in English - Basic English Grammar

hi everybody my name is Alisha in this

episode I'm going to talk about how to express fractions and percentages I'm

going to talk about a few different patterns you can use and I'm going to

talk about some questions that people have especially with prepositions so

let's get started okay the first thing that I want to look at

is this chart over here this style of chart we call a pie chart in English it

looks like a pie in this case for this example I've made it into data about our

favorite desserts just for example so the black part is people who like ice

cream red is cake and blue is pie so just for our example but I want to use

this to explain how we talk about percentages so percent is the word that

we use for this symbol this sort of circle slash circle symbol we use the

word percent to explain this so when we want to talk about data in this way we

can use percent before a noun phrase and we use it with the word of so to use

this data as an example we would say for example 25 percent of people prefer cake

as in this example or here 50 percent of people prefer ice cream so when you're

using a percentage please make sure to include the number of course followed by

percent so 25 percent 50 percent follow that then with the preposition of 25

percent of people so in this case my data is about people's preferences so

your noun phrase may change in this case I'm talking about people people related

data and their preferences which is why at the end of this sentence includes the

word like preferred cake or people is my noun this may change depending on your

data and depending on what do you need to explain but in

general this is a pattern that you can use to talk about percentages so 25% of

30% of to talk about these so please be careful of this when you are explaining

data in this form or maybe in another form as well generally though if you

want to explain your data in running text meaning just regular text you can

use a pattern like this let's look though at something that can

cause a little bit of confusion especially about prepositions let's

imagine that you need to explain some data in a graph maybe data that's

changing so here I have a couple of different patterns one is red referring

to this red line here and another blue referring just to this blue line here

just to explain the the way that we explain these really so let's take a

look though I've made a graph the data doesn't really matter so much here like

what we're actually looking at I want to focus though on the change of the data

here so on this on this axis I have like 10% to 50% and each dash represents a

10% difference here so the red line I've made an example pattern which is

something something increased by 10% here so please notice I'm using by in

this sentence so from point 0 on this axis until point 2 here we see the line

increases from 0 to 10 percent so to one way to describe this change is by saying

that something something in this case maybe I don't know this was about

dessert so maybe like the the number of people who made desert at home increased

by 10 percent so this by this shows the degree to which something happened so

this is telling us the amount of change in other words the degree of change

shows by here increased by so this is the total change let's compare this then

to the blue line here so the only difference here I've used the

position to increased to 20 percent so this is a sentence that matches this

blue line here so I've tried to show from year to to year 3 at this point at

year 3 in this case at point three on this axis the data is now at the 20%

point so I moved it from 10 percent at 2 to 20 percent at 3 and here I've used

increased to 20 percent this shows us sort of the upper limit of the data

using 2 shows us the limit of the data so like how far the data went it's not

referring to the amount of change it's referring to the point at which the data

stops or like the end point for that data so here by using 2 we see that this

means actually the endpoint by refers only to the amount of change so I could

say for example in this in this line the red line I talked about before I can say

maybe the percentage of people cooking at home increased by 10 percent

yes as in my original example or I could also say in this case the number of

people cooking at home increased to 10 percent both are correct here because

both refer to a 10 percent change or rather they refer to a 10 percent change

yes using by but in this case 10 percent is also the endpoint for the data for

that year so in this case book by and 2 could be correct however with the blue

line here the data here I'm saying it increased to 20 percent in this time

period so that's the endpoint so 2 is showing us the endpoint here but if I

want to talk about the level the amount how much this changed I would need to

use the same expression so here 0.2 was it 10 percent 0.3 is it

20 percent that's a 10% difference here so for this blue line I could say in

year 3 from year 2 to year 3 the number of people cooking increased by 10

percent again so in this case and in this case

the increase is ten percent total so please be careful

by shows us the amount of increase to refers to the end point of that increase

so in other words what is sort of the the last data point for that that time

period for example so please be careful of your preposition choice in this

sentence now these two sentences show the word

increase you can also use the word decrease of course meaning to go down

I've used this as a verb here but if you want you can also use increase or

decrease as a noun as well so for example this graph shows an increase so

here I'm using increase as a noun shows an increase of which we see here

an increase of 10% from year zero to year two so from year zero to year two

the amount of increase in other words so how much did it increase similar to this

point here so when I do it this way and increase and I need to use of before the

amount so please be careful of your preposition choices here they can make a

very big difference especially by into two so please be cautious when you're

choosing which preposition to use when you're presenting data ok let's go to

the last point for today the last thing I want to talk about is fraction so

these sorts of things you might see in recipes you might see in data we call

these fractions but some people have questions how do you read these how do

you explain them out loud so let's take a look I have here three examples

generally a general rule first is to read the top number here in this case I

have one two and three as the top numbers we should read the top number

just as you would a regular number one two three four five six whatever so read

the top number as a regular number in the singular form so one so you don't

need to read it in a plural form don't try to change the top number at all the

bottom number however we should read the bottom number like you would a date like

a day of the like the like the third or the fourth or

the fifth for example so please use the same sort of numbering as you would for

days of the month so in this case 3rd 6th and 10th we would read them in the

same way that we do dates so we also need to use the plural form for this

unless the top number is a 1 so if the top number is a 1 we would read this

with a singular form if the top number is more than 1 we should read this with

the plural form so for example one third would be this 1 2 6 this is a hard one

for pronunciation 2 6 it's even hard for native speakers to

say 3/10 3/10 so 1 1 3 2 6 3 tenths so if it's difficult for you to say don't

worry it's hard for me to say too but the the plural form should only be used

I'm sorry the plural form should always be used unless the top number it's a 1

ok another exception to this rule is if the

bottom number here is 2 so if for example you see something like this like

in a recipe or whatever one over - we don't say like 1 second we don't use

that here we just say 1/2 or 1/2 so in a recipe we would say like 1/2 a cup of

sugar or half a cup of flour for example so please keep this in mind so if the

number is a 1 use the singular form if the number is more than 1 use the plural

form for the bottom number and read the bottom number in the way you would read

a date all right so those are a few points that I wanted to introduce about

percentages and graphs and fractions as I've noticed that they can be difficult

to to explain properly sometimes so I hope that this was useful for you if you

have any questions or if you want to try something out in the comments please

feel free to do so if you liked the video please make sure to give it a

thumbs up check us out at English class 101.com and subscribe to the channel too

if you haven't already thanks very much for watching this episode and I will see

you again soon bye

you