ShmoopTube

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Percents of Change, a la Shmoop. There’s nothing Larry the Lobster loves

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more than playing his LBox after a long day of...wait, what is it lobsters do?

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That’s it, a long day of lobotomies. However, the new LBox controller has too many

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buttons…

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… and Larry needs to buy the retro model again.

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Because Larry is a lobster. When the LBox was first introduced a few years

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ago it was $249.

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But by now the price has been slashed to $199.

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What is the percent of the decrease? To find the formula we will use to solve the

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problem, let’s ask ourselves what we’re looking for.

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We know the reduced price, which we call the “price decrease…”

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…and we want to know what percent of the original price that is, which we call the

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“percent decrease.”

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To find the The Percent Decrease we will need to divide the Price Decrease by the Original

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Price. First, let’s find the Price Decrease, which

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is the Original Price minus the Discounted Price.

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249 minus 199 equals 50. Now let’s plug in the numbers we know.

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Price Decrease is 50, and Original Price is 249. So, this gives us our formula: Percent

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decrease = 50 divided by 249.

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That gives us point-201. But we are looking for a percent.

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To convert it to a percent, just move the decimal point over two places to the right.

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So the percent decrease equals 20.1 percent. Awesome! Despite Larry’s lack of opposable

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thumbs, he can finally claw his way to beating The Legend of Zelda.

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Larry’s math skills will be just fine, but we’re still concerned about how he makes

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a living…

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