Question

I am not understanding how to get the percentages by looking at the bell curve. When the problem states "approximately what percentage of people have a score above 47?"

Answer 1

Note that mean, median and mode of a normal distribution (bell shaped curve) is same.

Hence 50% observations lie above or below mean/median/mode.

Now coming to your question, you did not mention what is 47.

I am assuming it's the mean of observations.

Then 50% observations are above 47.

If 47 is not the mean of observations then you can refer to the emperical histogram above.

Let μ be the mean and σ be the standard deviation of a normal distribution then as you can see in above histogram, approximately 68% observations lie between μ-σ and μ+σ.