Ratio, proportion and rates of change worksheet — GCSE Higher

1.A shop sells ribbon by the metre. 2 m costs £3.00, 4 m costs £6.00, and 7 m costs £10.50. Does this data show that the cost is directly proportional to the length of ribbon bought? Choose the correct verdict and reason.

2.A room is drawn on a plan with a scale of 1 : 200. On the plan the room has an area of 12 cm². Work out the real area of the room, in square metres.

3.A taxi journey of m miles costs C pounds, where C = 2.5m + 3. A driver says the ratio C : m is the same for every journey. Is the driver correct? Give a reason for your answer.

4.A mobile phone tariff is shown on a straight-line graph with the monthly cost, C pounds, on the vertical axis and the amount of data used, g gigabytes, on the horizontal axis. The line passes through (0, 10) and (8, 26). Work out the gradient and say what it represents.

5.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.

6.The ratio of cats to dogs in a shelter is 3:4. There are 18 cats. Work out the total number of animals in the shelter.

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 population of fish in a lake is modelled by the recurrence P_{n+1} = 1.1P_n − 30, where P_n is the population after n years, 30 fish are removed by fishing each year, and P_0 = 400. After how many complete years does the population first exceed 460?

9.2.4 kg of cheese costs £36. Work out the cost of 1.5 kg of the same cheese.

10.£1 is worth 1.25 US dollars. Write the ratio of pounds to dollars in its simplest form, using whole numbers.

11.A statue exerts a downward force of 68.4 N on its base, which has an area of 2.85 m². Work out the pressure that the statue exerts on its base, in N/m².

12.Write the ratio 8 : 15 in the form 1 : n.

13.There are 84 passengers on a double-decker bus. 35 of the passengers are adults and the rest are children. Write the number of adults as a fraction of the number of children. Give your answer in its simplest form.

14.The exchange rate is £1 = 1.28 US dollars. Convert £350 into US dollars.

15.The value of a delivery van, in £, is plotted against its age, in years, since it was bought. At age 2 years, the gradient of the tangent to the graph is −950. What does this tell you about the van at age 2 years?