Answers (1)
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.
When you read, instead of looking at one word at a time, look at two words. That forces you to stop talking to yourself, so you are no longer limited to reading as fast as you can talk. You probably talk about 100 words per minute (WPM). The average college graduate reads 300 WPM. Just by looking at two words at a time you can read 600 WPM. Then by looking at a whole line at a time you can read much faster. The big benefit is that your memory expands along with your reading speed so you can remember the large volume of information you are taking in. With a little practice it is possible to read an entire page in two seconds with near total recall of the information on it.