Question

The value of a car dropped from $7400 to $6800 over the last year. What percent decrease is this?

Answer 1

To compute the percent change, we first need to find the dollar value change: $6800-

$7400 = -$600. Often we will take the absolute value of this amount, which is called the

absolute change: l−600l = 600.

Since we are computing the decrease relative to the starting value, we compute this

percent out of $7400: 600/7400 = 0.081= 8.1% decrease. This is called a relative change.