a. you would do 1346/1500 to get 0.8973333333333. i you want to check that you can do 1346/0.8973333333333 and you would get 1500. I'm just going to round 0.8973333333333 down to 0.897. So for town B you would also do 1546/1800 which brings you to 0.858889 you can again do 1546/0.858889 but i found that 0.8588888888 gives you the most accurate answer. so rounding that down to 0.859
b. you can see that 0.897 is a larger percent that 0.859 so town a had a larger increase than b