Ratio, proportion and rates of change worksheet — GCSE Higher

1.A shade of paint is made by mixing blue paint and white paint. To make 5 litres of the shade, 2 litres of blue paint is used and the rest is white paint. Write the ratio of blue paint to white paint in its simplest form.

2.Maya buys a vintage car for £15000. Its value is expected to increase by 4% each year for 2 years. She then plans to sell the car and use £2000 of the money from the sale to buy a trailer. Work out how much money she will have left after selling the car and buying the trailer.

3.A firework rocket's height above the ground, in metres, t seconds after launch, is modelled by h = 30t − 5t². Use a chord between t = 1 second and t = 3 seconds to estimate the instantaneous rate of change of the height at t = 2 seconds, in m/s.

4.A map has a scale of 2 cm : 5 km. A footpath measures 8 cm on the map. Work out the real length of the footpath, in kilometres.

5.Two investors put money into a business in the ratio 3:5. The first investor puts in £1,200. Work out the total amount invested by both investors.

6.A tank is filled at a rate of 3 litres every 2 minutes. Given that 1 litre = 1000 cm³, work out the flow rate in cm³ per minute.

7.Two mathematically similar tins have heights 8 cm and 12 cm. Jayden says that the volume of the larger tin is 1.5 times the volume of the smaller tin. Give a reason why Jayden is incorrect, and work out the correct volume scale factor.

8.Paint costs £14.40 for every 20 m² of wall it covers. Assuming the same rate, work out the cost of the paint needed to cover 56 m² of wall.

9.A shop's daily profit, in pounds, is plotted against the price charged for an item, in pounds. A tangent to the profit graph at a price of £15 passes through the points (12, 540) and (18, 480). Work out the instantaneous rate of change of profit with respect to price at £15, and state whether profit is increasing or decreasing there.

10.A cyclist travels d kilometres in t hours. Write down an expression, in terms of d and t, for the cyclist's average speed in km/h.

11.A shop sells rope by the metre. 3 m costs £7.50 and 5 m costs £11.00. Does this data show that the cost is directly proportional to the length of rope bought? Choose the correct verdict and reason.

12.A coach travels the 54 miles from London to Brighton in 1 hour 30 minutes. Work out the average speed of the coach, in mph.

13.Priya invests £750 in a savings account that pays simple interest. After 3 years, the account contains £840. Work out the annual rate of simple interest.

14.Two printers' running costs are shown on separate straight-line graphs of total cost against number of pages printed. Printer A's graph has gradient £0.04 per page. Printer B's graph has gradient £0.05 per page. Work out how much cheaper it is to print 200 pages on Printer A than on Printer B, based on these running costs alone.

15.Two broadband providers show their monthly cost on straight-line graphs, with the cost in pounds on the vertical axis and the data used in gigabytes on the horizontal axis. Provider X's line passes through (0, 15) and (100, 35). Provider Y's line passes through (0, 5) and (100, 45). Work out which provider is cheaper for a customer who uses 40 gigabytes in a month.