I feel like I should always add a note that how I write POSH solutions are NOT good practice and should NOT be used as a reference. At work I may end up writing 50 scripts in a day for various purposes managing and reporting on a massive 20,000+ device environment. I try to get as much done in as few keystrokes as possible because of it, but divine assistance is almost always required to read it afterwards.

By the merit you offered, using the instructions:
rate for a day is p divided by 36000
rate for a day is .02 / 36000
That is incorrect.

Let us instead say:
rate for a day is p divided by 360
rate for a day is .02 / 360
That is correct.

Your point supports mine. Much appreciated.

The author has a penchant for making kata that are more than just programming challenges. Mainly mathmatics, but sometimes by his/her general proclivity for circumlocution or sesquipedalian practices.

See? Annoying isn't it?

If p% is the rate for a year the rate for a day is p divided by 36000 since banks consider that there are 360 days in a year.

Shouldn't this be p divided by 360? Dividing the rate by 36000 will give you the percentage rate for every 100th of every day rather than every day alone.

If p0 is the population at the beginning of /a/ year, without any additional guidance as to what year, then it would stand to reason it is the population at the beginning of every year as a defining variable /or/ it is an unknown year in which case there is no population to begin calculations with. Not only that, but one could reason years preceeded the year of p0 population as it is not specified as the beginning year, but simple /a/ year. This would alter what could be reasoned in turn as the correct solution to how many /entire/ years to reach the final population by any number of additional years needed to reach p0, since that is just the population at the beginning of /a/ year and not the starting year .

If we assume p0 is not only the population at the beginning of /a/ year, but also the population for the first year (year 0) of our calculations, then all is well. But assumptions are not facts, and that's only derived from the necessity of a starting point and the provided examples.

p0 needs to be specified as year 0's population, the starting year for our count and calculations, and not just /a/ year.