ポイント as percent


In my writing class, I was surprised to learn that ポイント can be used to mean
パーセント in graphs. In English, we don't normally call percentage points just
points. Does anyone have any background / insight as to when/where ポイント can be
used in Japanese?




It's just a shortened form of "percentage point." Japanese is a language that
loves to abbreviate things, and saying パーセントポイント every time could be unwieldy,
and using "percentage points" is more accurate than saying "percent" when
talking about increase if we're talking about a simple increase in a number of
percentage points. For example, if we have 50%, and we say "It increased by
10%," technically that would make 55%. However if we say "It increased by 10
percentage points," it would be 60%, and that's where Japanese takes the usage
from.

You can find some more details under [用例 here on
Wikipedia](http://ja.wikipedia.org/wiki/%E3%83%91%E3%83%BC%E3%82%BB%E3%83%B3%E3%83%88).




It's just a shortened form of "percentage point." Japanese is a language that
loves to abbreviate things, and saying パーセントポイント every time could be unwieldy,
and using "percentage points" is more accurate than saying "percent" when
talking about increase if we're talking about a simple increase in a number of
percentage points. For example, if we have 50%, and we say "It increased by
10%," technically that would make 55%. However if we say "It increased by 10
percentage points," it would be 60%, and that's where Japanese takes the usage
from.

You can find some more details under [用例 here on
Wikipedia](http://ja.wikipedia.org/wiki/%E3%83%91%E3%83%BC%E3%82%BB%E3%83%B3%E3%83%88).

