Final answer:
To determine what percentage of students ate cereal, divide the number who ate cereal by the total number of students, and multiply by 100. For example, if 21 out of 25 students ate cereal, it's 21/25 times 100, resulting in 84% of students having eaten cereal.
Step-by-step explanation:
The question is asking to find out what percentage of students ate cereal. This can be calculated by expressing the number of students who ate cereal as a fraction of the total number of students and then converting that fraction to a percentage.
For example, if there are 25 students in total and 21 of them ate cereal, you would set it up as a fraction like this: 21/25. Then to find the percentage, you would calculate (21/25) × 100 which equals 84%. Therefore, 84% of the students ate cereal.
Following a similar process, if a researcher finds that 15 out of 23 students in a class are carriers of Neisseria meningitides, you would use the fraction 15/23 and then convert this into a percentage by calculating (15/23) × 100 which approximately equals 65.22%. Hence, about 65.22% of the students are carriers.