Re: According to the table, approximately what percent of the population o
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12 Mar 2025, 04:00
OFFICIAL EXPLANATION
To find what percent of the total population has a nonAfrican mother tongue, we need two pieces of information: the total population of Kenya, and the number of non-African mother tongue speakers. The first piece we can find pretty easily; we're told that there are 22,020,000 people in Kenya. It's a bit harder to find the number of non-African mother tongue speakers. The information in the table gives us the speakers of the major Bantoid, major Nilotic, and major Kushitic languages. These are all African languages, since the title of the chart tells us that they're African. In addition, the information below the chart tells us that there are 1,309,000 mother-tongue speakers of unlisted African languages. Then all the African mother tongue speakers must be listed in one of these places, and if we add up the totals, we'll get the total having an African mother tongue. Subtracting that from the total population of Kenya will leave us with the number of non-African mother-tongue speakers: just what we want.
Adding up the numbers in the chart, we find that for the three language groups listed, the total of the major languages is $14,002,000+5,933,000+225,000$ or approximately $20,225,000$. Adding the speakers of unlisted African languages, we get 20,225,000 + 1,309,000 or approximately $21,500,000$. Subtracting this from the total population of Kenya, we find that there are approximately 500,000 mother-tongue speakers of non-African languages.
All that's left now is to divide this into the total population. We get $\(\frac{500,000}{22,020,000}\)$ or approximately $\(\frac{5}{220}\)$ or $\(\frac{1}{44}\)$. Since this is slightly larger than $\(\frac{1}{50}\)$ or $\(2 \%\)$, the best answer choice must be $\(2.5 \%\)$.