Percentage

Have you ever looked at your grown-up’s phone and seen the little battery icon with a number next to it? Maybe it says 75. Or have you walked past a store with a big, bright sign that shouts, “50 off EVERYTHING!”? Have you ever wondered what those numbers really mean? They are little clues, and I am the secret helper that lets you understand what they're saying. I help you see a piece of something much, much bigger. Imagine a giant, delicious pizza cut into 100 perfectly even slices. If you eat just one slice, you’ve eaten one piece out of the hundred. If your friend eats 10 slices, they’ve eaten ten pieces out of the hundred. That’s my whole job. I take big things—like a whole pizza, a whole phone battery, or a whole price—and I slice them into 100 little parts so you can understand them easily. It's time I introduced myself. I’m Percentage, but my friends call me Percent. You’ve probably seen my special symbol, %, which is like my secret handshake.

My story didn't start with phones or video games, though. It started a very, very long time ago in a place called Ancient Rome. Can you picture it? Stone roads filled with people in togas, bustling markets selling pottery and spices, and the grand Colosseum standing tall. Even back then, people needed me. The ruler, Emperor Augustus, had a big job running the empire. He needed money to build roads, pay soldiers, and keep things running smoothly. He decided to create a tax, but he wanted it to be fair for everyone. So, he used my idea. He declared that for every 100 coins a merchant made selling goods at the market, they had to give just one coin to the empire. This was called the ‘centesima rerum venalium,’ which is a fancy way of saying one-hundredth of the value. In simpler Latin, they called the idea ‘per centum,’ which means ‘by the hundred.’ That was me, helping an emperor be fair over two thousand years ago. After my time in Rome, I traveled. During the Middle Ages, I became very popular in Italy with merchants who sailed the seas to bring back silks and jewels. They needed me to figure out how much profit they were making. They started saying ‘per cento,’ which is Italian for ‘by the hundred.’ During this time, something funny happened to my name. Scribes, who were people that copied books by hand, were always in a hurry. Instead of writing out ‘per cento’ every time, they started to write it faster and faster. First, they just wrote ‘p’ and then ‘cento.’ Then they started to draw a little line through the ‘cento.’ Over hundreds of years of scribbling, it slowly morphed into the symbol you see today: %. My symbol was created by accident, a happy little scribble that stuck around.

Now, I’m back from my trip through time, and I’m busier than ever. You can find me almost everywhere you look. When you get a test back from your teacher and it says you got 95 out of 100 questions right, that’s me saying you got 95%. When you look at the back of a cereal box, I’m there telling you that one bowl gives you 20% of the vitamins you need for the day. Is it going to rain today? A weather forecaster might say there is a 30% chance of rain, helping you decide if you need an umbrella. I’m even in your video games, showing you that the level is 88% loaded and you’re almost ready to play. I help scientists, too. They use me to understand our amazing world, like when they figured out that about 71% of our entire planet is covered in water. That’s a huge piece of the whole Earth. I may be just a way of measuring things in pieces of 100, but I am a powerful and friendly tool. I help everyone make smarter choices, understand big ideas, and see how all the small pieces fit together to make a whole world. So next time you see my symbol, %, give it a little wave. I’ll be there, ready to help you measure your world.