[Saren]

Some things that I think might help you.

1. Forget the questions for a minute and look at the diagram, see it just as a collection of shapes. Draw the diagram again on a new piece of paper for yourself; make sure it's a fresh one and make the diagram pretty big so you have room for labelling it.

2. Work out the length of every single straight line on your diagram, even if it’s obvious, write it on anyway. Don’t be afraid to draw extra lines if you need them or to section up a line into parts (useful for reminding yourself of the widths of borders)

3. Work out the area of all the easy shapes you can see (rectangles, circles, half circles) from your formulas and write them on your diagram. Don’t be afraid to split shapes up into smaller areas.

4. These sorts of problems tend to have one awkward shape that you can’t use a formula to find the area of. The way you find this area is by elimination as Kitalrez said. For example, to find the area of a piece of card with a circle cut out of it, find the area of the rectangle of the card (which is the area of the shape + the area of the circle), find the area of the circle then: area of the shape = area of rectangle – area of circle.

5. Once you have all the areas on your diagram then you can start worring about questions 2 and 3, identify which areas need to be blue and which areas need to be maple and find the totals.

6. When you do the paint questions remember that if you need a volume of paint that corresponds to 5.7 cans of paint that you can’t buy 0.7 of a can of paint, you have to buy in whole cans. i.e you can buy 5 cans of paint or 6 cans of paint and 5 cans wouldn’t give you enough.

7. General rule of thumb when you aren’t sure how many decimal places to use is to use 2.