One baseball team played 30 games throughout their entire season. If this baseball team won 50% of?

Get a ruler in your hands. Measure things until you start to understand how a ruler works. Measure some stuff and figure out where the center is. Say you measure a book and it's 7/8" thick. You look at your ruler and see that every eighth is divided into two sixteenths, so obviously half of 7/8" is going to be 7/16". If you write that out you have 1/2 x 7/8 = 7/16. And you notice that 1/2 is divided into 2/4 and then into 4/8 and so on, so you can convert anything to anything by multiplying all the numbers on top and then all the numbers on bottom.

Other rulers are divided into 10 and 100 parts. But an inch is still an inch, so anything on one ruler can be translated to the other ruler. A half inch on one ruler is 5/10 or 50/100 on the other. An eighth inch is just 12.5 marks when you have 100 marks per inch. A metric ruler divides an inch into 25.4 parts, so a half inch would be 12.7 of those parts. Pretty simple, isn't it? Practice this a bit and people will think you went to wizard school.

Percent is simply a ruler with 100 marks. The only confusion is trying to keep track of what the marks represent, since that changes from time to time.

"One baseball team played 30 games throughout their entire season. If this baseball team won 50% of those games, then how many games did they win?"

So you have one ruler with 30 marks and you want to translate that to a ruler with 100 marks. Fifteen marks means one half, and half the other ruler would be 50, which we call 50% (percent means "per 100). So your answer is 15.

In most cases we rewrite percent by moving the decimal point two places. So then 50% becomes 0.5 and now we can punch that into a calculator: 0.5 x 30 = 15

Sometimes you get things on the same ruler by "cross multiplying". You don't actually cross multiply, but that's what it looks like you do.

50/100 = x/30

100x = 1500 The rule is you can do any valid operation on both sides of an equation and it will still be equal. Divide by 100.

x = 15

Practice a little and you can do these things in your head as fast as a person can talk.