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Math Lesson 5.3.5 - Percentage Distribution

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Welcome to our Math lesson on Percentage Distribution, this is the fifth lesson of our suite of math lessons covering the topic of Percentage Increase and Decrease, you can find links to the other lessons within this tutorial and access additional Math learning resources below this lesson.

Percentage Distribution

Percentage distribution tells you the number per hundred that is represented by each group in a larger whole. In other words, percentage distribution occurs when we have a data set presented as percentages, where each percentage represents different groups of the whole (100%).

It is clear that the total of all individual percentages in these data sets must be 100%. However, due to rounding made when expressing a number as a percentage of another number, we may have slight deflections from 100%, which is acceptable.

Thus, if we have four data groups A, B, C and D out of the whole, we have for the percentage distribution:

%A + %B + %C + %D = 100%

Example 7

A school has 1247 students where 134 of them (category A) receive scholarships due to their high results while 261 students (category B) receive scholarships because of low family income. The rest (category C) are full tuition students. Calculate the percentage distribution in this data set.

Solution 7

We can calculate the individual percentages of each category by applying the known formula

%(Y) = Value of Y/Total × 100%

As there are three student categories A, B and C, we obtain

%(A) = Value of A/Total × 100%
= 134/1247 × 100%
= 0.1074578 × 100%
≈ 0.1075 × 100%
= 10.75%
%(B) = Value of B/Total × 100%
= 261/1247 × 100%
= 0.2093023 × 100%
≈ 0.209 × 100%
= 20.93%

Now, we have to find the number of students N(C) included in the category C (full tuition) before calculating the percentage of the school students they represent. We have:

N(C) = N(total) - N(A) - N(B)
= 1247 - 134 - 261
= 852 students

This category makes

%(C) = Value of C/Total × 100%
= 852/1247 × 100%
= 0.68323977 × 100%
≈ 0.6832 × 100%
= 68.32%

Thus, adding the above percentages yields

Total percentage = 10.75% + 20.93% + 68.32%
= 100.00%

as it should be.

More Percentage Increase and Decrease Lessons and Learning Resources

Percentages Learning Material
Tutorial IDMath Tutorial TitleTutorialVideo
Tutorial
Revision
Notes
Revision
Questions
5.3Percentage Increase and Decrease
Lesson IDMath Lesson TitleLessonVideo
Lesson
5.3.1Percentage Change
5.3.2Percentage Increase
5.3.3Percentage Decrease
5.3.4Finding the Original Value after a Percentage Change
5.3.5Percentage Distribution

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  7. Continuing learning percentages - read our next math tutorial: Applications of Percentage in Banking. Simple and Compound Interest

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