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Thanks (to you, and everyone who participated) for all your help! This will be useful in many texts to come. 4 KudoZ points were awarded for this answer
... Looking at it more generally, if c is the arithmetic mean (average) of a and b, 1/c is not the average of 1/a and 1/b. It may not be far out, but it's not the same. Dunno if this helps!
To Jack: To take the harmonic mean of two fractions (say 1/3 and 1/2) you invert them (to get 2 and 3), take the arithmetic mean (2.5 or 5/2) and invert this again, to get 2/5 or 0.4 or 40%. ...
I tried to work it out in a response to David. I though if в 2 раза меньше is half, and в 3 раза меньше is a third, 2-1/2 раза меньше is five twelfths or 41.67%. But he divides 100 by 2.5 which comes to 40% & I think he's right. But can anyone explain it?
to bashworth: The use of the phrase ``factor of'' is very similar to the use of ``times''. For example, 1 quart is a factor of 4 smaller than 1 gallon, or 1 gallon is a factor of 4 bigger than 1 quart. www.astronomynotes.com/mathrev/s1.htm
If there were 100 murders in 2006 but only 10 in 2007, Russian switches to the 10 and says that 100 is ten times as much. English stays with the 100 and says that there was a drop of 90 from that, or 90%, and this value can never exceed 100%.
The English system starts from a given point (say a year ago) and measures the increase or decrease since then (usually in percentages). The Russian/European system starts with the given point for increases, but the end point for decreases.
To Zamira: Editors tend not to be mathematicians. The treatment of percentages etc. in news reports and translationswould drive me mad, if I let it! "ten times less" etc. is usually a sign of translation. "dropped by 90%" is usually native English.
It does it mean the same mathematically. Re times: umm, we publish each quarter a bulletin, which gets proofed by a US editor who never changed our times into percentage. Is not times much clearer than percents, i thought it was.
Actually, I think it depends on the percentage. With 33%, 1/3 sounds better because it is more precise. When it goes over 100%, though, I think we tend to use percentages.
Thanks for your response. I tried using you idea and realized that I didn't provide enough context. The whole sentence is: "Как видим, два прошедших года принесли рост в 3,7 раза. "
Right now I have: "Thus we see that the last two years have brought (a) 3.7 times growth in the sector."
This doesn't work
Automatic update in 00:
Answers
3 mins confidence:
provided 3.7 times growth
Explanation: .
Сергей Лузан Russian Federation Local time: 18:14 Specializes in field Native speaker of: Russian PRO pts in category: 28
