Ratio, proportion and rates of change worksheet — GCSE Higher

1.A vehicle is worth £18000. Its value decreases by 15% each year. Using the recurrence V_{n+1} = 0.85V_n, with V_0 = 18000, find the first whole number of years after which the vehicle's value drops below £10000.

2.Ffion is paid £11.20 per hour. She works 6 hours on Monday and 4.5 hours on Tuesday. Work out her total pay for the two days.

3.A scale model of a bridge is built at a scale of 1 : 120. The real bridge is 84 m long. Work out the length of the model, in centimetres.

4.An ice-cream van's daily takings, in £, are modelled by a curve plotted against the average temperature that day, in °C. At a temperature of 22°C, the gradient of the tangent to this curve is 14. What does this gradient tell you about the takings at 22°C?

5.A recipe for 8 muffins needs 200 g of sugar. Sam wants to make 20 muffins for a bake sale, and he already has 350 g of sugar. Work out how many more grams of sugar he needs to buy.

6.A machine fills bottles at a constant rate. It fills 18 bottles in 3 minutes. Working at the same rate, work out how many bottles the machine fills in 8 minutes.

7.A laptop priced at £520 is first increased by 15%, and then the new price is decreased by 20%. Work out the final price of the laptop.

8.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.

9.A shop's takings were £4500 in May. In June the takings fell by £900. Write the June takings as a fraction of the May takings, in its simplest form.

10.A garden centre sells two mathematically similar sacks of grass seed. The amount of lawn a sack can treat is proportional to the volume of seed inside it. The smaller sack is 20 cm tall and treats a lawn of area 30 m². The larger sack is 40 cm tall. A gardener needs to treat a lawn with an area of 500 m² using only the larger sacks. Work out the minimum number of larger sacks needed.

11.A garden centre has 90 rose bushes in stock. It receives a delivery that increases its stock of rose bushes by 20%. In the same week it sells 150 lavender bushes. Work out the new number of rose bushes, then write it as a fraction of the number of lavender bushes sold, giving your answer in its simplest form.

12.A patient is given a dose of 200 mg of a drug. Each hour, 30% of the drug remaining in the bloodstream is eliminated, and then a further dose of 50 mg is given. Using the recurrence D_{n+1} = 0.7D_n + 50, with D_0 = 200, work out the amount of drug in the bloodstream after 2 hours.

13.A car travels at a constant speed. It travels 150 miles in 3 hours. At the same speed, work out how far it travels in 5 hours.

14.A recipe uses flour, sugar and butter in the ratio 8 : 3 : 5. Write the ratio of flour to the rest of the mixture (sugar and butter combined) in its simplest form.

15.Leah puts £4000 into a savings account paying 3% compound interest each year. At the end of 2 years she takes out all of the money and spends £1500 of it on a laptop. Work out how much of the money she has left.