Ratio, proportion and rates of change worksheet — GCSE Higher

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

2.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.

3.A straight-line graph shows the cost, C pounds, of hiring a bike for h hours. The line passes through the points (1, 12) and (4, 27). Which of these statements about the line is true?

4.A concrete block exerts a force of 45 N on the ground through a base with an area of 0.05 m². Work out the pressure on the ground, in N/m².

5.Two mathematically similar cylinders have heights in the ratio 3 : 4. Write the ratio of their volumes in its simplest form.

6.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.

7.A factory machine produces bottles at a constant rate. In 45 minutes it produces 810 bottles. The factory needs 2,160 bottles for an order. Working at the same rate, work out how many minutes it will take to produce the order.

8.The value of a rare coin increases by 12% each year. The coin is currently worth £270. Work out the value of the coin after 2 years, giving your answer to the nearest penny.

9.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.

10.The height of water in a tank, h metres, t minutes after a tap is opened is modelled by h = 0.02t² + 0.5. Estimate the instantaneous rate of change of the height at t = 10, using the gradient of the chord joining t = 9 and t = 11.

11.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.

12.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.

13.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.

14.A graph shows y plotted against x. The graph is a curve that gets closer to both axes but never touches them, and y decreases as x increases. Write down whether this graph could show direct proportion, inverse proportion, or neither.

15.A map has a scale of 1 : 25 000. Two towns are 5 km apart in real life. Work out the distance between the towns on the map, in centimetres.