in Lifestyle

The ingenious viral trick for mentally calculating percentages:

Throughout our schooling, we acquire a series of essential mathematical knowledge to continue our training in what fascinates us most and then make the leap into the world of work.

While it is true that some people do well in any discipline, there are others who, from a very young age, admit to being afraid of certain subjects, such as mathematics for example. Numbers are a real headache for many people.

So, even in the daily life of adults, we sometimes tremble when it comes to doing a quick calculation. In general, the most classic way to calculate a percentage is a simple rule of three. This involves multiplying the initial amount by the percentage you want to calculate and dividing by 100.

However, a tweet from American writer and editor Ben Stephens has uncovered a mathematical trick that makes it extremely easy to mentally calculate percentages, without resorting to calculators. The formula is simple: X% of Y = Y% of

Application to real life

This tip can be very useful for the small calculations that we have to do on a daily basis. Following Stephens’ publication, some doubts arose. A user asked him to give an example applicable to real life. So the author suggests this: “If we go to a store where there is an 8% discount on everything, but the final price is not indicated on the label, and we want a jacket that initially cost 50 dollars, what is the final price? Just reverse the bill. 50% of 8, which is a reduction of 4 dollars.”

Although the tweet has been around for a while, it often reappears on the social network and many users continue to thank him for his message. “Typical. I spend ages tweeting about important stuff about Trump and Brexit, then I post a tweet about math (a subject I’ve never tweeted about before) and the internet goes crazy,” the author noted in a later tweet.