Percentage value higher than 100%

percentages

I have two values A= 3.8620E+00 B = 1.4396E+00

According to this post, to calculate how much A is higher than B in percentage we do this:

((A-B)/B)*100 = ((3.8620E+00 - 1.4396E+00)/1.4396E+00)*100 = 168.2690%

Does this mean the value A is 168.2690% higher than B?

Does this calculation is correct?

When the percentage is higher than 100%, what does that exactly mean?

Best Answer

Your method is absolutely correct. There is nothing intrinsically wrong with using percentages greater than 100%. Percentage is just another way of writing a fraction with a denominator of 100. Just as you can have an improper fraction, (4/3) so you can have something like an "Improper Percentage" as well.

Think about how Google's Android Market can grow by 861.5% in year-over-year revenue, just to pick one example. It basically means that every year Google's Android Market's growth becomes 961.5/100 times the growth of the previous year.

Now to solve your case, we take a simpler example. Let A be 100 and B be 10. Now we need to find how much higher is A when compared to B. We continue with finding A-B = 100-10 =>90. Now when we express this in percentage we get (A-B/B)*100 that is 900%.

Now let's verify this. What is 900% of B. It's 9B. Now when you add 9B and B you get 10B which is A.

So to conclude, a percentage higher than 100 is alright.

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