GRE Percentage Problems

Updated December 29, 2009

The GRE Quantitative Section contains all sorts of Problem Solving questions. Some of them involve Percentages.

What You Need to Know

Percentage problems are usually pretty basic, even though they can be confusing. There aren’t a lot of them on the GRE, because with just 28 math questions you can’t fit too much questions on any one subject, but you can bet there’ll be some percentages in there.

That said, if you want to make sure to get the top GRE score, it’s always worth going over the basics. So here’s what you need to know:

Percentage Problems

A percent is $\frac{1}{100}$ of a number. That’s all there is to it, really. One percent of 100 is 1, 1 percent of 200 is 2. On the other hand, 7% of 300 equals $300 * \frac{7}{100} = 21$ .

Some trickier questions involve percentages greater than 100%. You can still solve these the same way you did the other questions- for example, 400% of 17 equals $17 * \frac{400}{100} = 68$ . You just multiply the number by the number of percentages divided by 100.

You can also convert fractions and percentages. For example, $\frac{1}{4} = \frac{25}{100} =$ 25%. You just need to change the fraction to a denominator of 100. It doesn’t always work out to a clean number though- $\frac{1}{3} = 33.33333...$ %.

See? Percenatges are easy. Here are a couple of examples to make things even clearer:

Column A: $\frac{5}{22}$
Column B: %.

Answer: Well, now we need to convert these to the same form, either fraction or percentages, to compare them. Since 22 can’t be made easily into 100, we’ll convert 22% back to fractions. So 22% $= \rac{22}{100} = \frac{11}{50}$ . Now we need a common denominator- the easiest is 1100 . So, $\frac{5}{22} = \frac{250}{1100}, \frac{11}{50} = \frac{242}{1100}$ . Finally, since 250 is greater than 242, we can tell that the first column is greater, and A is the answer.

Bob has 50 cats. The ratio of white:orange:black cats is 2:5:3. What percentages of cats is orange?

Answer: This is pretty basic. Overall, $\frac{5}{2 + 3 + 5}$ cats are orange, which equals $\frac{1}{2} = 50$ %. Easy.

That’s all you really need for tackling GRE’s percentages questions.

Practice Free GRE Questions!

Online GRE Practice Tests

Here are some practice GRE quantitative tests:

GRE Quantitative (10 questions), GRE Quantitative (10 questions), GRE Quantitative Practice (10 questions), GRE Quantitative Practice Test (10 questions), GRE Quantitative Questions (10 questions), GRE Quantitative Comparison (10 questions) GRE Quadratic Equations (10 questions), GRE Algebra (9 questions) GRE Arithmetic Practice (10 questions), GRE Arithmetic (5 questions)

Learn More!

Check out the GRE Quantitative page for more information about the GRE’s quantitative section.

TalentEgg: Student and New Graduate Careers