Question

Carlos predicts he has 24 dollars in his wallet. If Carlos actually had 33 dollars, what was Carlos' percent error? Round your answer to the nearest tenth of a percent.

Answer 1

To find the percent error, we want to first find out how far off our answer was in dollars. To find this, we can subtract our estimated value - 24 - from our actual value - 33 - to obtain an error of 33 - 24 = 9 dollars. To figure out what percent this represents, we'll need to express that 9 dollars of error as a fraction of the actual value of 33 dollars. This gives us the fraction
`(9)/(33)`, which we can reduce to
`(3)/(11)`.

To convert this number to a percentage, we first convert it to a decimal fraction, giving us
`0.\overline{27}`. We can multiply this number by 100 to convert it to a percentage, which gives us
`27.\overline{27}\%`, or approximately 27.3%, when rounded to the nearest tenth of a percent.