From the course: Business Math

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Convert to percentages: Least common denominator, stock prices, and common-size financial statements

Convert to percentages: Least common denominator, stock prices, and common-size financial statements

From the course: Business Math

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Convert to percentages: Least common denominator, stock prices, and common-size financial statements

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- Let's take a disturbing but brief journey back to middle school math. I'm sure that you learned, as I did, about the least common denominator. For example, maybe you were asked the following type of question. Which of the following fractions is the largest: 1/7th, 2/11th, 3/17ths or 5/29ths? Well, the horrible way that we learned how to do this in school was to compute the least common denominator for all four of these fractions. And in this case, the least common denominator is 37961. So we are now supposed to figure out how many 37961ths there are in each of the four fractions. Nightmare. I'm sure it was good middle school mental exercise for all of us to find least common denominators, but there's a much easier way to do this. Just convert each of the four fractions into a decimal as follows. 1/7th, 0.143. 2/11ths, 0.182. 3/17ths, 0.176. And 5/29ths, 0.172. Now the question is easy to answer. Which of the four fractions is the largest? 2/11ths. Which is the equivalent, with…

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