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Lesson 13 of 500 · Extra Passages
⭐ 30 XPPercent Error
📖Story Brief #13
Percent error measures how close a measured value is to the actual or true value.
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Percent error measures how close a measured value is to the actual or true value. To calculate percent error, you subtract the true value from the measured value, take the absolute value of that difference, and then divide it by the true value. Finally, you multiply by 100 to get a percentage. For example, if you measured the length of a pencil to be 15 cm, but the actual length is 14 cm, you would find the difference (15 - 14 = 1 cm). Then, you divide that difference by the true length (1 cm / 14 cm) and multiply by 100, giving you about 7.14%. This means your measurement was off by approximately 7.14%. Understanding percent error helps us see how accurate our measurements are, which is useful in science and everyday life.
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Question 1
1 of 2How do you calculate percent error?
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