The number of North American children who are obese—that is, who have more body fat than do 85 percent of North Ameri...
ShirnelApril 23, 2020
Percentage, Ratios, etc
I am good at math; however, I seem to be having trouble seeing the logic in every ratio/percentage question I encounter. I can't drive the logic out of the stimulus, and thus I need assistance in understanding the best approach to these types of questions.
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This is, in my opinion, a pretty unique question. Kind of tough as well at first glance.
The general advice I would give as far as these numbers based questions would be to we wary of what conclusions you draw based on the numbers
Having a number on its own tells you nothing about the overall percentage or ratio. Same goes for the reverse.
E.g. I have 1000 hockey cards. But what percentage or ratio is that? How can we possibly know without knowing the total?
E.g. I have 2% of the land in this area. What acreage is this? How can we possibly know without knowing the total again?
This question is a bit different in that it gives us both a percentage (or more accurately what seems to be a percentage) and we are told the number is increasing.
Obesity is having more body fat than 85% of those their age. If the number of children with obesity is increasing, this means the overall total number of children must be increasing.
If the overall number of children is increasing, and the percentage of obesity stays the same. Then by that logic, both the number of obese children and non-obese children must be rising.
I hope this helps. Please let me know if you have any other questions or would like me to expand further.
ShirnelApril 23, 2020
Hmm, it does help somewhat. I am going to keep that perspective in mind and if any other alike question comes up, I'll apply that perspective and see if it helps me get to the right answer. Thank you, Ben.
confusedNovember 2, 2022
It's confusing because my first thought was that if the number of obese children are increasing, then not obese children are decreasing (e.g. if the sample size is the same 100, 86 vs 14 causes increase in obese and decline in not obese. I mistakenly chose underweight but realize underweight is not the same is not obese. By process of elimination I guess this answer is the only one that makes sense.
Emil-KunkinNovember 4, 2022
Hi confused,
For this question, make sure to understand what obese means. It is defined as a portion of the population. If something that is defined at the top ten percent increases, that must mean that the total population increases.
