Ivory Tower: Exclusive access to this year’s extra maths exam paper set by Rishi Sunak
Extra maths 2024
"A qualification for all, whether you want it or not."
Part of the Advanced British Standard (subject to validation, terms and conditions apply)
Sponsored by Goldman Sachs Platinum Apprentices Scheme
Paper 3 (Higher education and research)
You may use independent civil servants to verify your calculations
Not to be taken in conjunction with Trussonomics 101
Upon completion of the paper, proceed straight to conscription in the army or compulsory volunteering in a care home
Section 1: Home economics
1. What is the difference in price between a term’s fees at Winchester College and a year’s subscription to Sky TV? Explain why your parents might have provided you with one and not the other? Which would you have preferred? Illustrate your answer with a drawing of your favourite character from MTV Cribs.
2. A boy buys a smart coffee mug for £180 that keeps your beverage at the perfect temperature. He also buys a designer rucksack for overnight travel to Cornwall for £750. Does he have more money than sense? For an extra mark, calculate whether the rucksack still cost less than an off-peak return from London Paddington to Plymouth.
3. After a well-known celebrity/prime minister appears on television wearing a pair of Adidas Samba trainers (retail value £90), sales of the popular sneaker slump. How little will you be able to get for your trainers on eBay now? Calculate the hit to the GDP of Germany following the decline in Samba sales.
4. A man installs a new swimming pool in his Yorkshire mansion, requiring the local electricity network to upgrade the power supply, at the same time as a nearby municipal pool for the public is forced to close due to rising energy costs. Is this a worse look than having an anonymous donor buy your golden wallpaper? How many minutes of interest on your blind trust fund would be required to pay for the network upgrade?
Section 2: Speed, time and distance
1. A man has to attend an 80th anniversary commemoration of D-Day in Normandy. How early would he need to duck out of events to get back to London for a recorded interview with ITV? Explain why it is OK because it’s only the French bit that he is missing. For an extra mark, work out the number of votes he could expect to lose as a result of this calculation? Show your answer to a Conservative parliamentary candidate and watch them weep.
2. A man goes from London to Cornwall by train, accompanied by a camera crew, for a campaign photo opportunity. He returns alone by private helicopter. Try to book a standard-fare return helicopter journey with Great Western Railway. If the camera crew return by rail replacement bus service, how many days later will they make it back to London? Will the campaign still be running?
3. The Ministry of Defence decides to scrap a £40 million helicopter contract for the RAF because it does not represent value for money. The prime minister intervenes to save the contract and uses the service to travel from London to Southampton. How much money would a Downing Street aid have to bet on the date of the election, at odds of 10-1, to cover the difference in cost with a £30 day return on Southern Railways? On a scale of 1-10, how entitled do you think the prime minister is?
4. The prime minister, foreign secretary and the King all take separate private jets to attend COP28 in Dubai. Calculate the amount of carbon that will need to be offset against the hot air generated at the meeting. (You should give your answer in standard measurements to the nearest Wales, eg a forest three and a half times the size of Wales.) If the prime minister didn’t really want to go to COP28 in the first place, then it’s OK, isn’t it? They were lucky to have me him.
Section 3: Election spending
1. A prime minister calls a snap general election. Using a weather app, calculate the best time of day at which he should make the announcement without looking like a drowned rat escaping his own sinking ship. How much does it cost to get rainwater out of Armani? Would it be cheaper just to buy a new suit?
2. A party starts an election 20 per cent behind in the polls. At an average of two disasters per day on the campaign trail, how long will it be before they are A. 25 per cent behind in the polls? B. Pushed into third by Reform UK? C. Replaced as the official opposition by the Liberal Democrats? D. Have fewer MPs than Sinn Féin? Draw a pie chart of the new parliament to illustrate your answer.
3. A man visits Wales and asks workers in a brewery whether they are “looking forward to all the football”? Someone points out that Wales did not qualify for the tournament. To the nearest centimetre, how out of touch is this man? To the nearest hour, calculate when he realised it was a terrible idea to call an election. For an extra mark, work out how quickly he can get back to London via private helicopter.
4. A chancellor introduces a fiscal stimulus to encourage social mixing during a pandemic without consulting the chief scientific adviser or chief medical officer. At an R rate greater than one, calculate which spread faster, the Covid-19 virus during Eat Out to Help Out, or public outrage over ditching Normandy veterans for an interview with ITV?
Section 4: University-level maths
1. There are 72 higher education institutions either going through, or have recently completed, redundancy programmes. At this rate, how long will it be before there is no one working in universities at all? How much more quickly can vice-chancellors achieve the target of zero staffing on their own before the Conservatives legislate for a cull of rip-off degrees? What percentage of salary should vice-chancellors receive as an annual bonus for achieving this target?
2. If rampant inflation has eaten away any increases in the science budget, by how much are researchers worse off now than they were 14 years ago? How many civil service jobs will have to be cut to pay for any increases in the science budget in the next parliament? Who will be left to administer it? Use a red-tape diagram to illustrate your answer.
3. A university finance officer is trying to calculate their institution’s tax liability for the last academic year. How long will they be on hold with HMRC before someone answers the phone? How much longer is this than the average time spent on the phone trying to get a GP appointment? What would be quicker, waiting to speak to someone at HMRC or a slow lingering death in sinking sand?
4. A student receives their maintenance loan. After accommodation, bills and food, how little do they have left? Express your answer as a howl of frustration at the broken student-finance system. How many hours per week will the student have to work to make ends meet? Express your answer both in terms of the number of part-time jobs they will need to take on, and the number of hours of classroom teaching they will miss as a result.
Section 5: Bonus question, Swiftonomics
Taylor Swift’s Eras tour is in the UK until 20 August. Calculate how much more Swifties will add to GDP in Britain than the economic policies of the Conservative government?
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