Commentary: Classifying and Solving Percent Problems

 

            This handout focuses on classifying in-context percent problems into missing “part,” missing whole, and missing percentage, including increase/decrease problems and problems involving large percentages.  When appropriate, estimations are discussed prior to exact solutions, and several solution methods are compared. 

            Lots of times discussion about “types” of problems degenerates into rote ways to classify and solve each type of problem.  I tried to avoid this problem with this sheet, although from working on the topic with students, I thought it important to help them see the common structure of percent problems.  8/05

 

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