Welcome back to Percent Foundations for Everyday Life! This is the second lesson of the course, and we are picking up right where we left off. Last time, we built a solid understanding of what percentages mean and practiced reading them in everyday contexts. Now we are going to unlock a skill that comes up every time we use a calculator, read a spreadsheet, or double-check a receipt: converting between percents and decimals. By the end of this lesson, we will be able to move confidently in both directions, even with tricky values below $1\%$ or above $100\%$.

We already know that a percent is simply a number "out of 100." Writing $25\%$ is the same as writing , and when we carry out that division, we get . So and are really two ways of expressing the — one wears a sign, and the other uses a decimal point.