Video Transcript
A police station recorded 127 complaints for theft last year and 158 this year. What percent of the number of last year’s complaints is the number of complaints recorded this year? Round your answer to the nearest whole percent.
Last year, there were 127 complaints. This year, there were 158. As the number of complaints has increased, our answer must be over 100 percent. We need to divide the number of complaints recorded this year by the number of complaints recorded last year, in this case 158 divided by 127. And in order to turn this into a percentage, we need to multiply by 100. 158 divided by 127 multiplied by 100 is equal to 124.4094488.
We were asked to round our answer to the nearest whole percent. Therefore, we need to look at the number immediately after the decimal point. In this case, it is a four, which is less than five, so we will round down. Rounding this down gives us an answer of 124 percent.
The number of complaints recorded this year is 124 percent of the number of complaints recorded last year. We could also say that there has been a 24 percent increase from last year to this year, as adding 24 percent of 127 onto 127 gives us 158.
