Uncle Igor	Uncle Ludwig

Uncle Igor weighs 80 pounds and is 6 feet tall. Uncle Ludwig weighs 880 pounds and is 4 feet tall. We want to compare them to each other using percentages.

Our first problem involves building a new Uncle Ludwig from Uncle Igors. How many Uncle Igors would we need to get the raw materials to build an Uncle Ludwig?

Well, we're going to need 880 pounds for Uncle Ludwig and Uncle Igor weighs only 80 pounds. So we're going to need 11 Uncle Igors to make one Uncle Ludwig. So how do we turn that into a percent? You multiply 11 by 100 to get 1100%. If we wanted to build an Uncle Igor from Uncle Ludwig. we'd only need 1/11 of an Uncle Ludwig to make an Uncle Igor. (That's part of one of Uncle Ludwig's arms.) 1/11 is 0.09 if you represent as a decimal, and 9% if you represent it as a percentage.  So from the standpoint of weight, we can say that Uncle Ludwig is 1100% of Uncle Igor and that Uncle Igor is only 9% of Uncle Ludwig. The "THAN WHAT?" here for both examples is weight, but whose weight we're comparing against varies. If you were going to build an Uncle Ludwig from an Uncle Ludwig, you'd need 100% of Uncle Ludwig to do it, which seems intuitive, and when you do the arithmetic, it works. 880 / 880 = 1.0, which becomes 100%.

Our second problem involves stacking the Uncles. If we're stacking Uncle Ludwigs, how many are we going to need to get Uncle Igor and vice versa?

We're going to need 6 feet for an Uncle Igor, and we've only got 4 feet in an Uncle Ludwig. So we're going to need 6 / 4 or a 1.5 Ludwigs. Representing that as a percentage, Uncle Igor is 150% of Uncle Ludwig. Representing  Uncle Ludwig in terms of Uncle Igor, we'd need 4 feet of Uncle Igor, or 4 /6, or 0.67 Igors. Represented as a percentage, we could say that Uncle Ludwig was 67% of Uncle Igor. The "THAN WHAT?" here is height, and again, whose height we're using makes a difference.