Score 70+ on Paper I by deciding ORDER, not what to skip

191 q · 40% HARD · the second-heaviest chapter on recent papers, just behind Trigonometric Functions. Seven subtopics and the HARD is spread rather than pooled, so this chapter does not cherry-pick: you own all seven or you lose ten marks. Only Line — Equation, Direction Cosines, and Vector Form is genuinely cheap at 21% HARD.

214 q · 56% HARD · the largest chapter in the bank and the hardest cornerstone. It DOES cherry-pick, which is what makes it manageable: Dot Product (46 q, 26% HARD) is the cheap third, while Scalar Triple Product (68 q, 74%) and Cross Product (63 q, 63%) carry most of the pain. Bank the cheap third on the first sweep; leave triple products for the second pass.

174 q · 21% HARD · the cheapest cornerstone by a distance and the best marks-per-hour chapter on the paper. Seven subtopics, none above 31% HARD, and Approximations using Differentials is 12 q at 0% HARD. Volume puts it in the cornerstone strand; behaviour puts it on your opening sweep.

207 q · 38% HARD · the second-largest chapter in the bank and the heaviest on recent papers, 5.08 q/paper across 2024-2025. Three parts over six notes pages: equations (47 q, 36% HARD), solution of triangle (69 q across the rules page and the half-angle page, 41%) and inverse trigonometry (94 q across values, identities and equations, 36%). The parts cost about the same, so the chapter is drilled whole — but inside inverse trigonometry the identities page is 63% HARD while the values and equations pages are under 25%, so bank those two first. Solution of triangle is the part that is rising.

135 q · 36% HARD · six subtopics that split by SOLUTION METHOD, which is exactly how the questions are set. Order/Degree/Formation (31 q, 23% HARD) is recognition work and near-free; Linear (Integrating Factor) at 63% is where it gets expensive. Newton's Law of Cooling is 5 q lifetime at 60% HARD — last in the prep queue, and still answered on the paper.

151 q · 52% HARD · the most expensive cornerstone per question. Its cheap corner is real but small: Foundations (8 q, 13%) and Trigonometric Integrals - Powers and Identities (11 q, 18%) are 21 questions of near-free marks. Everything else sits at 48% or worse, and Trigonometric Integrals - Rational and Substitution Forms is 34 q at 74% HARD.

135 q · 47% HARD. Foundations, Chain Rule & Differentiability (21 q, 33% HARD) is the only cheap entry; the two biggest subtopics — Inverse Trigonometric Differentiation (38 q, 47%) and Implicit & Special Forms (28 q, 54%) — are where the marks and the minutes both are. Derivative of One Function with Respect to Another is 7 q at 71% HARD and goes last.

107 q · 21% HARD · the biggest quick-win and the eighth-heaviest chapter on recent papers. Three of its four subtopics sit at 19% HARD or below; only Conditional Probability, Independence and Bayes' Theorem (24 q, 33%) costs real time.

84 q · 29% HARD. Almost pure procedure: build the table, apply the equivalence, read the switch circuit. The 31% is not spread evenly — Switching Circuits is 10 q at 60% HARD, the densest block in the chapter, while Negation of Statements and Quantifiers is 14 q at 14%. Drill the standard circuit forms rather than reasoning each one out fresh.

57 q · 21% HARD across four small subtopics, two of which are at 13% and 10%. Mean = np and variance = npq carry more questions than anything else here; recognising the binomial setting is most of the work.

43 q · 5% HARD · the cheapest chapter in the bank by some margin. The corner-point page is 16 questions and has never produced a HARD one; the feasible-region page is 13 at 0%; both HARD questions sit on the 9-question reading-constraints-off-a-figure page. Three hours of drilling buys a question a paper at near-certainty.

43 q · 19% HARD across four notes pages, with every HARD question on the slope-and-angle page. Worth more than its q/paper suggests because the techniques repeat elsewhere: the foot-of-perpendicular and distance work here is the 2-D dialect of Line and Plane, and the perpendicularity condition m1*m2 = -1 is the same idea as the vector dot product being zero.

86 q · 55% HARD · the highest %HARD of any chapter in this strand, and it does not cherry-pick: every one of its seven pages is between 44% and 67% HARD. Two questions a paper at full price. Prepare the whole toolkit or accept that you are guessing them — which, on this exam, is a legitimate choice.

67 q · 46% HARD. The three property pages — odd/even symmetry (11 q, 55%), King's property (17 q, 47%) and modulus/greatest-integer splitting (13 q, 15%) — are 43 of the 68, and each is exactly the kind of one-line trick that turns a four-minute integral into a thirty-second one. The trigonometric block (11 q) is the expensive corner at 73% HARD.

47 q · 47% HARD, and the determinant and adjoint identities page is 69%. Worth more than one question a paper suggests, because the vanishing-determinant degeneracy test learned here reappears as concurrency, collinearity, coplanarity and the scalar triple product across four other chapters.

43 q · 33% HARD. The equation page (12 q, 33%) and the concentric-and-touching page (6 q, 17%) are the cheap entry; Tangents (13 q, 46%) and Two Circles (7 q, 43%) are the expensive corners and go last in the queue. The greatest-and-least-distance move here is the same as the complex-modulus-on-a-disc one.

43 q · 33% HARD, and it splits cleanly: Modulus and Argument is 17 q at 29% HARD and Locus 12 q at 17%, while Algebra with the cube roots of unity is 15 q at 47%. Take the modulus and locus pages on the first sweep — the greatest-and-least-modulus shape is answered by distance to the centre plus or minus the radius, with no calculus at all.

44 q · 32% HARD, and 35 of those 44 are the two area pages — under one curve (14 q, 14% HARD) and between two curves (21 q, 38%). That makes it the most concentrated chapter in this strand and a cheap three hours; the circle, ellipse and hyperbola page (9 q, 44%) is the only corner that needs a standard result learnt cold.

42 q · 43% HARD, with the cost concentrated on the angle page (11 q, 64%) while the joint-equation page runs 17%. It is formula-driven rather than insight-driven, which makes it a good late addition: the perpendicularity condition here is a + b = 0, the pair-of-lines dialect of the same idea that is m1*m2 = -1 for lines and a zero dot product for vectors.

40 q · 40% HARD. The smallest chapter with a playbook and one of the most error-prone: the failure mode is a mis-set-up count rather than a mis-executed formula, and Circular Arrangements (6 q) runs 83% HARD. Drill the constraint shapes — together, never together, at least, at most — rather than the formulas; the digit and polygon counts are the cheapest marks here.

38 q · 47% HARD. The HARD questions sit on two pages: multiple angles (9 of 13) and sum-to-product (8 of 13); compound angles is 2 of 13. Eight of its 19 HARD questions are evaluations at 18°, 20° and π/8 that fall to a memorised value rather than to algebra, so learn sin 18°, cos 36° and tan(π/8) first; the conditional identities (α + β + γ = π and the like) are the expensive half and belong on the second pass.