What this practice covers
These questions are drawn from past CIE 9708 papers and filtered to indifference curves and budget lines. You answer, you find out immediately whether you were right, and you get the reasoning for the correct option and for each distractor. Wrong answers go to a mistakes locker so you can come back to exactly those.
Practice is free. You need an account only so your progress and your mistakes are still there next time.
Start practising Paper 3 MCQs →
What examiners see students get wrong here
These are the errors that cost marks on indifference curves and budget lines, taken from our own topic notes. Read them before you practise and you will recognise the traps in the questions.
- Drawing two indifference curves that cross. Crossing curves break transitivity, so the map is invalid.
- Treating the numbers on indifference curves as measured utility. The ranking is ordinal, so only the order matters.
- Putting the optimum where an indifference curve cuts the budget line. The consumer can always reach a higher curve, so the optimum is the tangency.
- Reading the budget line slope as a statement about preferences. It is the ratio of the two prices.
- Reading the slope of an indifference curve as prices. It is the marginal rate of substitution, which reflects preferences.
- Pivoting the budget line when income changes. A change in income shifts it parallel; only a price change pivots it.
- Changing both intercepts when only one price changes.
- Calling the whole price effect the substitution effect, when it is the substitution effect plus the income effect.
Revise it first
If any of the above is unfamiliar, work through the notes before practising: Indifference Curves and Budget Lines revision notes.