Ratio, proportion and rates of change worksheet — GCSE Higher

1.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.

2.The concentration of a pollutant in a lake, in arbitrary units, follows the recurrence C_{n+1} = 0.75C_n + 40, with C_0 = 500: each week, 25% of the pollutant breaks down naturally, and then a further 40 units enter the lake from run-off. An ecologist classifies the lake as safe once C_n first drops below 300. Find the first whole number of weeks after which the lake is safe.

3.A metal sample has a mass of 342.6 g and a volume of 18 cm³. Work out the density of the sample, in g/cm³, to 1 decimal place.

4.Priya is paid £58.50 for working 7.5 hours on a Saturday. Work out her rate of pay, in £ per hour.

5.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.

6.A runner's speed is 8 m/s. Given that there are 3600 seconds in an hour and 1000 metres in a kilometre, work out the runner's speed in km/h.

7.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.

8.A car is bought for £12000. Its value falls by 15% in the first year and by 10% in each year after that. Work out the value of the car 3 years after it was bought.

9.Given that 1 mile ≈ 1.6 km, work out a speed of 55 mph in km/h.

10.The number of subscribers to a streaming app, in thousands, is plotted against time, in months since launch. A tangent to the graph at t = 6 months has gradient 4.8. A tangent at t = 18 months has gradient 1.1. A manager claims the app is growing faster at 18 months than it was at 6 months. Work out how the growth rate has changed, and decide whether the manager is correct.

11.A car is bought for £17,500. Its value decreases by 12% in the first year, and by a further 10% of its reduced value in the second year. Work out the value of the car at the end of the second year, giving your answer to the nearest pound.

12.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.

13.Two mathematically similar garden ponds have surface areas of 12 m² and 27 m². The fencing needed to go around the smaller pond costs £96. Assuming the cost of fencing is proportional to the perimeter of the pond, work out the cost of fencing the larger pond.

14.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.

15.A scale drawing of a garden uses a scale of 1 : 20. Write down a formula for the real length, L metres, in terms of the length on the drawing, d centimetres, given that 1 metre = 100 centimetres.