Ratio, proportion and rates of change worksheet — GCSE Higher

1.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.

2.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.

3.A greenhouse's temperature, in °C, is recorded every hour during the day: 09:00, 15.0; 10:00, 18.4; 11:00, 20.1; 12:00, 19.8; 13:00, 17.2. Work out between which two consecutive readings the instantaneous rate of change of the temperature is most likely to have been zero.

4.A laptop bag has a mass of 2.4 kg. A school bag has a mass of 3.6 kg. Write the mass of the laptop bag as a fraction of the mass of the school bag, giving your answer in its simplest form.

5.A cup of tea is cooling. Its temperature, in °C, is plotted against time, in minutes, since it was poured. At t = 4 minutes, the gradient of the tangent to the graph is −3.2. What does this tell you about the tea at t = 4 minutes?

6.Order these three values from smallest to largest: 3/8, 0.43, 41%.

7.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.

8.A concrete mix is made from gravel and cement in the ratio 5 : 1 by mass. The mass of cement is c kg and the total mass of the mix is m kg. Write down a formula for m in terms of c.

9.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.

10.Two quantities y and z are each in direct proportion to x, and are given by y = 3x and z = 7x. Work out the difference between the value of y and the value of z when x = 4.

11.A trust fund contains £8000. Each year, 5% interest is added, and then £600 is paid out to a charity. Work out the amount remaining in the fund after 2 years.

12.It takes 2 identical pumps 10 hours to empty a flooded basement. Working at the same rate, work out how many hours 5 of these pumps would take to empty the same basement.

13.An architect builds a scale model of a staircase before construction. The model is mathematically similar to the real staircase, at a scale of 1 : 10. The model covers a floor area of 0.4 m² on the plan. Work out the floor area the real staircase will cover, giving your answer in m².

14.The density of a type of solid plastic is 0.9 g/cm³. Work out the mass of 0.5 m³ of the plastic, in kilograms.

15.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.