Number worksheet — GCSE Higher

1.Rice is sold in a 400 g bag for £1.12 and in a 1.5 kg bag for £3.90. Work out how much less the rice in the larger bag costs per kilogram.

2.A tap fills a 20 litre bucket in 2 minutes 30 seconds. Work out the rate of flow, in litres per minute.

3.Leah measures the length of her classroom with a tape measure marked in centimetres. She writes the length down as 7.3157 m. Give a reason why this is not an appropriate degree of accuracy.

4.Work out (4 × 10³) × (3 × 10¹). Give your answer in standard form.

5.To estimate the cost of buying 38.7 m of rope at £21.40 per metre, both numbers are first rounded to 1 significant figure. Work out the estimate.

6.A café is planning its lunch menu. It will offer one soup from 3 choices and one sandwich from 4 choices, but the mushroom soup, one of the 3 soups, will only be served with the cheese sandwich, one of the 4 sandwiches, on a normal day. Work out how many different soup-and-sandwich combinations are available on a normal day.

7.A driving instructor is working out how many current-style UK number plates are possible. The format is 2 letters, then 2 digits, then a space, then 3 letters (for example AB12 CDE). The letters I, O and Q are never used in any letter position, leaving 23 allowed letters, but every letter and every digit may repeat anywhere on the plate. Work out how many different number plates are possible, giving your answer in standard form to 2 significant figures.

8.A charity trek covers 830 miles over roughly 19 days. By rounding each number to 1 significant figure, work out an estimate for the number of miles walked per day.

9.A speed camera measures a car's speed as 34 mph, correct to the nearest mph. Work out the smallest possible actual speed of the car, in mph.

10.A machine fills bags of sugar and shows the mass of each bag to the nearest 10 g. A checker rejects any bag whose actual mass is less than 996 g. One bag shows a mass of 1,000 g on the machine. Decide whether this bag could be rejected, and give a reason for your answer.

11.A restaurant adds a service charge of 15% to a bill of £120. Work out the service charge.

12.A company's turnover is 5.6 × 10⁷ pounds, spread evenly across 3.5 × 10² shops. Work out the average turnover per shop, in standard form.

13.A crowd of 8,400 people is recorded correct to the nearest 100. Work out the smallest possible number of people in the crowd.

14.A plank of wood is 5 1/4 m long. Pieces of length 3/4 m are cut from it. Work out how many complete pieces of 3/4 m can be cut from the plank.

15.A bag holds 5 different sweets. Noah takes 2 of the sweets out of the bag together, so the order in which he takes them does not matter. Work out how many different pairs of sweets he could take.