Difficulty: Rating: GCSE Marks:

GCSE Text:
Maria & Jose want to get married at a country club. The costs of holding a wedding there are displayed in a brochure:

Use of main house £2000, and £500 additional if gardens required.  Hot reception meals cost £25 per person.  For an evening celebration, a disco is charged at £500, and a buffet is available at a cost of £12 per person.

Maria & Jose want 60 guests to attend a hot sit-down meal, and then 100 guests to attend an evening do with a disco and buffet. They want to get married in the house and use the garden for photos.

a) Calculate the total cost of the wedding

The country club would need a 15% deposit to secure a wedding booking.

c) If they wanted to go ahead with their wedding at this venue, how much would Maria & Jose need to pay up front as a deposit?

Suggestions:
A common problem requiring arithmetic. For most students I would ask them to solve this without a calculator, and it would normally take 4-5 mins for a student to solve. The challenge isn’t too hard, but students often need encouragement not to give up simply because there is a lot of information to process.  It is useful to encourage clear workings and a structured layout when answering a question like this, as marks would be awarded for correct elements of the answer even if the final answer was incorrect.

Extension Ideas:
Teachers could extend the learning by considering:

• The wedding plans mean that the first guest would arrive at the country club at 11.30am, and everyone would leave by midnight.  How much has the day cost per hour of celebration?
• The budget for the one week honeymoon is £2500. A hotel has been booked for 6 nights at a cost of £120 per night. Flights have been booked for £150 + VAT at 20% per person. A champagne dinner at the Eiffel Tower has been booked costing £100 per person. How much money does Maria & Jose have left to spend on food and entertainment for their honeymoon?