I never understood the reliance on percentages to explain or describe technology and science to the general public. Perhaps people become accustomed to using percents from school grades and report cards. If real numbers are difficult for the general public to comprehend, would not graphs and related constructs provide more information and improve understanding?
Do not mean to go off topic. I agree with
@fresh_42 that people generally understand negative numbers as positive integers with appropriate
gerunds direction on a number line
such as decline, reduce, diminish, go down; that indicate a negative.
[Edit 20200110: This thread prompted me to review how contemporary mathematics teachers describe negative integers, reals and complex numbers to a student audience as displacement or distance from the origin on number lines.
While doing so, I modified my ideas about the use of percents in technical papers. The basic rule "know your audience" applies to both fiction and non-fiction publications. In this thread the intended audience, "the general public", likely benefits from the familiar comparison of values expressed as percentages. My technical writing produced in conjunction with engineering projects and a few corporate IPO's had an intended audience of scientists, engineers and senior management, not the general public, with appropriate use of scientific notation, lists and graphs. Thanks.]
