The fraction 8/42 is equal to 19.05% when converted to a percentage. This means that if you had 42 items and selected 8 of them, you'd have chosen about 19% of the total. It's a relatively small percentage, less than one-fifth of the whole.
In everyday situations, you might encounter this fraction or percentage in various contexts. For example, if 8 out of 42 students in a class wore glasses, you could say that 19.05% of the class wears glasses. Or if 8 out of 42 days in a period were rainy, you'd have rain on about 19% of those days. Understanding these equivalences can help in quickly grasping proportions in real-life scenarios.