Question

Kayla studied data collected on the school basketball team for one season. She noticed that a player on the team had 13 successful free throws out of a total of 20 attempted free throws. What percent is that?

Answer 1

If she is setting up a proportion to find the percent, the value of m would be any variable and the value of n would be 100.  When she solves the problem, m=65%.

13/20 is part out of whole.  The rest of the proportion will be "percent out of 100"; since we don't initially know the percent, we use a variable.  Thus we have

13/20 = m/100

Cross multiply:

20*x = 13*100

20x = 1300

Divide both sides by 20:

20x/20 = 1300/20

x = 65