SamePercentage

There are problems with percentages where it is easy for students to get confused about what is meant.

Suppose a student remembers the following as the problem to work on:

The percentage of females is 15% more than the males and together they equal 3,000,000. How many are in each group?

Does this mean that the female percentage is 15 percentage points greater or that the number of females is 15% more than the number of males?

If you point this out, most students will just ask which one was meant and do that problem.

I would be inclined to ask them to also tell me whether you get a different answer from each and why, as part of the process of clarifying their understanding of percentages.

For a few I might go on to ask: Could I find a value for the percentage difference (which was 15 above) for which both interpretations give me the same number of males? Is there such a value?