soft question: explaining proportions/percentages in simple terms I know this is a fairly easy question but I haven't been able to word it into Google so as it would give me a substantive list of resources.
Here's my question:
If a process is 25% efficient,  I'd multiply (1/0.25) by the output, which would yield what is necessary for a 100% efficient output. 
Is there a way to verbalize what this division is actually doing? (i.e. what are the units of 1 and 0.25)

You could say that you "divided out" the $25\%$ to return what $100\%$ would be.
To explain what $25\%$, or any percent, you could think of it as the amount of $\$1.00$ when you cut it up into $100¢$ and take $25$ of those pieces.
