In a village the number of houses and the number of flats are in the ratio 7 : 4 the number of flats and the number of bungalows are in the ratio 8 : 5 There are 50 bungalows in the village. How many houses are there in the village?

Good question! This is exactly the kind of question that could come up on the GCSE non-calculator paper. I think the main thing that makes this question tricky is sifting out the information and figuring out how to apply what you already know about ratios. So we know we have 50 bungalows, and for every 5 bungalows there are 8 flats. So to find the number of flats we would do 50/5 = 10 and then we would multiply that by 8 = 80.Now we have the number of flats, we can use that to find the number of houses in the same way. 80/4 = 20 and then we would multiply that by 7, which is 140.