50% of the population in alaska lives within a 50-mile radius of anchorage. if the total area of alaska is 586,412 square miles, about what percent of the total land area is within 50 miles of anchorage?
i would like to know how to go about solving this problem and the answer.

The whole problem is in the second sentence.  The first sentence is interesting,
but it has nothing to do with the actual math question.

The area of a circle is  (pi) (radius)² .

The area of a circle with 50-mile radius is (pi) (50)² = 2,500 pi = 7,854 square miles

That's  (7,854) / (586,412) = 0.0134 = 1.34% of Alaska's total area.