Video Transcript
Arrange the elements in the set, zero point five, 25 percent, zero point three, and negative four-fifths in descending order.
Descending order means you want to arrange your numbers left or right from largest to smallest. To better compare all of our numbers in the set, let’s change every number to be a decimal. Two of the numbers already are in decimal form, zero point five and zero point three. Therefore, we need to change the 25 percent to be a decimal and the negative four-fifths to be a decimal.
To go from a percent to a decimal, we need to divide by 100 and then remove the percent symbol. Therefore, 25 percent is equal to zero point two five. Next, let’s look at negative four-fifths. To go from a fraction to a decimal, we need to divide the numerator by the denominator, which is equal to negative zero point eight. Let’s go ahead and re-list all of our numbers.
Here we have our numbers listed again. One more thing that we could do is we could have every decimal have the same number of decimal places. So zero point five is the same thing as zero point five zero. Zero point three is the same thing as zero point three zero. Negative zero point eight is the same thing as negative zero point eight zero. Let’s place these on a number line to help visualize our descending order.
Here we have our numbers placed on the number line. So descending order means we need to go from largest to smallest. So our largest number should be all the way to the right on our number line, so zero point five. Our next largest number would be zero point three. Our next largest number would be zero point two five, which was written as 25 percent. And then lastly our smallest number, the number all the way to the left on a number line, would be negative zero point eight, which was originally written as negative four-fifths. Therefore, we took our elements and put them in descending order, which would be zero point five and zero point three then 25 percent and then finally negative four-fifths.