If you take a look at this beaker here, what proportion of it do you think is filled with water? Well, for something like this, you might say 75%, 0.75% or 3 quarters. All of these answers would be correct, because even though they all look different, they all have exactly the same value. This is because percentages, decimals and fractions are just different ways that we can use to describe proportions, which just means how much of something we have. For your exams, you're going to need to be comfortable using all of these, and also be able to convert between them.
For difficult values, like converting 0.65 into a fraction, there are specific techniques that we can use, and we're going to cover those in the next few videos. But for the more simple ones, like expressing three quarters as a percentage, it's much easier if you just learn them all off by heart. So for the rest of this video, we're going to go through the most common ones that are worth memorising. The best way to do this is to make a table with fraction, decimal and percentage columns. If we start with one over ten, that would be equivalent to 0.1 or 10%, whereas if we had 2 over 10, that would be equivalent to 0.2 or 20%, so everything is just two times as big.
And we could keep on going like this all the way up to one whole, which is 100%. Now, instead of trying to memorize this entire table, It's much better for you to just remember the first row, and then understand the pattern so that you can work out all the others. One thing you need to watch out for though is the simplified versions of fractions.
For example, 2 over 10 is the same thing as 1 over 5, so 1 fifth is equivalent to 0.2 and 20%. and the same goes for these other simplified versions. We're not going to go through all of them one by one, but just so that you've seen them all, it's also worth knowing one half, one third, one quarter, one fifth, and one eighth. And if you know all of these, then you can generally work out most of the other ones that you might need.
For example, if we wanted to find out what 3 over 8 is equal to, then it would just be 3 times as much as 1 over 8. So 0.375 as a decimal, or 37.5% as a percentage. Anyways, that's everything for this video. So if you enjoyed it, then do give us a like and subscribe, and we'll see you next time.