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Eda2s1ax Level3

This document provides two multi-part exercises about sequences and series. The first exercise asks Fred to determine whether two furniture payment schemes form arithmetic or geometric sequences, complete a payment table for the first 5 months of each scheme, and determine which scheme pays off a £1000 debt earliest. The second exercise involves completing tables to show the number of new bee colonies each year assuming no predators, the total number of live colonies each year, and the ratio of colonies between consecutive years. This ratio indicates the growth rate of colonies levels off over time.

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16 views

Eda2s1ax Level3

This document provides two multi-part exercises about sequences and series. The first exercise asks Fred to determine whether two furniture payment schemes form arithmetic or geometric sequences, complete a payment table for the first 5 months of each scheme, and determine which scheme pays off a £1000 debt earliest. The second exercise involves completing tables to show the number of new bee colonies each year assuming no predators, the total number of live colonies each year, and the ratio of colonies between consecutive years. This ratio indicates the growth rate of colonies levels off over time.

Uploaded by

qasicinfo
Copyright
© © All Rights Reserved
Available Formats
Download as PDF, TXT or read online on Scribd
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Edexcel A level Maths Sequences and series

Section 1: Definitions and notation

Exercise level 3 (Extension)


1. Fred is given a choice of 2 repayment schemes for some furniture he has recently bought.
A: Pay £20 in the first month and then increase the payments by £4 every
subsequent month.
B: Pay £20 in the first month, followed by an increase of 12% (to the nearest
penny) in every subsequent month.

(i) Explain whether in either or both of schemes A and B, Fred’s payments would form
an arithmetic or a geometric sequence.

(ii) Fred starts to produce the following table to calculate his payments in the first 5
months:
scheme A scheme B
month payment total payment total
1 20 20 20 20
2 24 44 22.40 42.40
3 28 72 25.09 67.49
4
5

Complete the table for the first 5 months.

(iii) Fred owes £1000 for his new furniture. By extending the table (or by calculation, for
which you are likely to need to know about logarithms) find which payment scheme
pays off his debt earlier.

(iv) From your extended table (or by direct calculation) find in which month the total
payment by both schemes is close to being equal.

2. “Bumper bees” have never been recorded in Britain until recently. A colony of bumper
bees will, normally, create another new colony in each of the first and second seasons of
its existence. But the colony will itself die out before its third season.
For the first time ever, a single colony was reported in Britain in 2001, which produced,
as expected, an extra new colony in 2002 and 2003, though it didn’t survive to produce
any further colonies.

(i) Complete the second row in the table below, to show the number of new colonies
that would have appeared in the years up to 2015, if there were no predators present:

1 of 2 30/04/19 © MEI
integralmaths.org
Edexcel A level Maths Sequences & series 1 Exercise
2001 2002 2003 2004 2005 2006 2007 2008 2009 2010 2011 2012 2013 2014 2015
new
colonies 1 1
total
colonies 1 2
ratio
y n+1/y n ----- 1

(ii) Complete the third row in the table, to show the total number of live colonies in any
year.

(iii) Complete the final row, to show the ratio of the number of live colonies in any two
consecutive years (this shows the ‘growth rate’ of the total number of colonies).
What happens to the ratio?

(iv) Use your results from (iii), based on the final column for 2015, to make a (very)
rough estimate of the number of live colonies likely in 2020, and compare it with a
calculated figure by extending the table.

2 of 2 30/04/19 © MEI
integralmaths.org

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