Title: Proportions
Course: UGQuants (SSPS) > Section: Maths Self Test

Proportions

A fraction can be understood as part of a whole number but it can also be used to indicate how much of a sample or population of cases is made up of a smaller group within that sample or population. E.g. if there are 1,000 social and political science students in a university and 600 of them are women, we can say that a proportion of 6/10 or 0.6 of the students are women (we could also write this as 0.60, but conventionally when presenting decimals we usually remove any unnecessary zeros).

Another way to think of a proportion is therefore that it is the result of dividing one number (the group of cases or things we want to express as a proportion of the total) by another (the total number of cases or things). So to calculate a propotion we simply divide the smaller number by the larger. E.g. if there are 1,500 social and political science students in a university and 450 of them are men the proportion of men is 450 ÷ 1,500 = 0.3.