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

205 q · 42% HARD · the heaviest chapter on recent papers. 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.

228 q · 55% HARD · the largest chapter in the bank and the hardest cornerstone. It DOES cherry-pick, which is what makes it manageable: Dot Product (50 q, 28% HARD) is the cheap third, while Scalar Triple Product (71 q, 72%) and Cross Product (66 q, 64%) carry most of the pain. Bank the cheap third on the first sweep; leave triple products for the second pass.

183 q · 23% 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 11 q at 0% HARD. Volume puts it in the cornerstone strand; behaviour puts it on your opening sweep.

144 q · 38% HARD · six subtopics that split by SOLUTION METHOD, which is exactly how the questions are set. Order/Degree/Formation (33 q, 24% 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.

159 q · 51% HARD · the most expensive cornerstone per question. Its cheap corner is real but small: Foundations (8 q, 13%) and Trigonometric Integrals - Powers and Identities (12 q, 8%) are 20 questions of near-free marks. Everything else sits at 48% or worse, and Trigonometric Integrals - Rational and Substitution Forms is 35 q at 74% HARD.

141 q · 47% HARD. Foundations, Chain Rule & Differentiability (21 q, 29% HARD) is the only cheap entry; the two biggest subtopics — Inverse Trigonometric Differentiation (39 q, 49%) and Implicit & Special Forms (31 q, 52%) — 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.

115 q · 20% HARD · the biggest quick-win and the sixth-heaviest chapter on recent papers. Three of its four subtopics sit at 19% HARD or below; only Conditional Probability, Independence and Bayes' Theorem (26 q, 31%) costs real time.

88 q · 31% HARD. Almost pure procedure: build the table, apply the equivalence, read the switch circuit. The 31% is concentrated in the switch-circuit and tautology subtopic (47 q, 36%), which rewards drilling the standard circuit forms rather than reasoning each one out fresh.

60 q · 22% 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.

46 q · 4% HARD · the cheapest chapter in the bank by some margin. Objective Function — Maximisation and Minimisation is 23 questions and has never produced a HARD one; Feasible Region is 23 questions at 9%. Three hours of drilling buys a question a paper at near-certainty.

46 q · 22% HARD across two subtopics. 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.

93 q · 56% HARD · the highest %HARD of any chapter in this strand, and it does not cherry-pick: both subtopics are above 54%. Two questions a paper at full price. Prepare both halves or accept that you are guessing them — which, on this exam, is a legitimate choice.

90 q · 49% HARD. Properties of Triangles (52 q, 42%) is over half the chapter and the cheapest part of it. Note the overlap: its Inverse Trigonometry subtopic (21 q) is the same material as the separate Inverse Trigonometric Functions chapter (73 q) — drill them together, not twice.

73 q · 37% HARD in a single subtopic — the whole chapter is one drill. Two questions a paper, and cheaper than most of this strand. Its 21 sibling questions inside Trigonometry - II mean the real footprint is 94 questions, which moves it up the queue.

99 q · 37% HARD · the largest chapter in this strand by lifetime count. Trig Identities, Compound Angle, and Equations is 77 of those 99 at 36% HARD, so almost all of the return sits in one drill. Properties of Triangle here overlaps the same-named material in Trigonometry - II.

73 q · 45% HARD. Symmetry, King's Property, and Absolute Value (42 q, 38%) is the cheaper and larger half, and King's property is exactly the kind of one-line trick that turns a four-minute integral into a thirty-second one. Substitution and Standard Form is 31 q at 55%.

50 q · 48% HARD, and the Adjoint and A·adj(A) subtopic is 64%. 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.

47 q · 38% HARD. Equation construction from diameter or centre (11 q, 27%) is the cheap entry; Two Circles — Tangency (9 q, 56%) is 9 questions in five years at the highest price in the chapter and goes last in the queue. The maximum-distance-from-a-point trick here is the same move as the complex-modulus-on-a-disc one.

46 q · 33% HARD, and it splits cleanly: Modulus, Argument, and Polar Form is 22 q at 18% HARD, while Algebraic Equations, Locus, and Cube Roots is 24 q at 46%. Take the modulus half 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.

47 q · 36% HARD, and 43 of those 47 are one subtopic — Area Bounded by Curves, Axes, and Lines at 33% HARD. That makes it the most concentrated chapter in this strand and a cheap three hours. Definite Integral as Application is 4 questions in five years at 75% HARD; it is not worth planning around.

45 q · 40% HARD across two evenly-priced subtopics (39% and 41%), so there is no cheap half. 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.

43 q · 42% HARD. The smallest chapter with a playbook and one of the most error-prone: both subtopics sit near 40%, and the failure mode is a mis-set-up count rather than a mis-executed formula. Drill the constraint shapes — at least one of, none of, all together, never together — rather than the formulas.