Statistics

More Than 100 Percent?

One of the questions we looked at in our recent survey of percent change problems involved percentages over 100%, which often confuse students. How can anything be more than 100%? Let’s look at a couple questions about that issue.

Percent Change: Markup and Margin

We have looked at how to calculate, apply, and undo a percent increase or decrease. Here we will look at some special terms used in business for percent increases, which have been a source of many questions over the years.

Three Times Larger: Idiom or Error?

Having just written about issues of wording with regard to percentages, we should look at another wording issue that touches on percentages and several other matters of wording. What does “three times larger” mean? How about “300% more”? We’ll focus on one discussion that involved several of us, and referred back to other answers we’ve …

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Talking About Percentages

A recent discussion with a student I was tutoring face to face, about an ambiguously worded problem, led me to gather a few answers we’ve given related to the words we use associated with percentages.

Three Meanings of “Percentile”

(An archive problem of the week) Having just discussed quartiles, I want to look at related issues concerning percentiles. There, I briefly mentioned different perspectives on the concept of quartile, and focused on differences in the details of the calculations; here I will focus mostly on the different perspectives, and then touch on variations in …

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The Many Meanings of “Quartile”

Some time ago I discussed various issues pertaining to the concept of median in statistics. The same issues, and more, affect the concept of quartile (the median being the second quartile), so much so that different statistical software packages produce many different answers for quartiles. I have seen this affect students, who are taught one …

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