Percentages

I get called this morning to solve a problem, my mother does the puzzles in the Daily Express (yes they're still buying it, but I think they don't bother reading the 'news' anymore) and she was having trouble with one of their 30 second maths problem.

176 - increase by 37.5% (excuse me, in your head!)
242 - double it
484 - divide by 3
161.3 um the answer has to be an integer.

So she tried to work backwards and got a bit lost, and thus enlisted my help.

44 - times by 3
132 - halve it
66 - decrease by 37.5%
48... hold on a second that previous 66 is awfully familiar; indeed 66 is 37.5% of 176. Yep the equation should have been 'take 37.5%'.

This isn't the first time one of these puzzles has been incorrect, what is interesting is that as far as I can tell every time they have been wrong it's been due to the percentage part of the problem. This seems to suggest that either whoever is writing these things doesn't have a firm grasp of how percentages work, or whoever is responsible for laying it out is changing the wording.

Now as this is a newspaper that often prints stories along the lines of 'Crime up by 10%' it shakes the faith (more so) that they even know what they're talking about.