CCAT Practice Test: 9 Worked Questions and the 18-Second Problem

Answer: B. Answer as many of the remaining questions as you can, guessing where needed — wrong answers cost nothing

🐱 Criteria states there is no penalty for wrong answers, so a blank and a wrong answer score identically — which makes leaving anything blank strictly worse than guessing. The third option is the one worth naming, because it rests on a belief that feels right and is false here: your score is the count of correct answers, not a percentage of what you attempted, so unanswered questions cannot protect anything. Re-checking is also a poor trade at 18 seconds per question — verifying one answer costs roughly the time of attempting two new ones.

Answer: B. Guess and move on: a minute spent here costs you the chance to attempt three other questions

🐱 Every question contributes equally to the raw score, so a question that costs three times the average is worth a third as much per second spent. The 'come back at the end' habit is imported from tests that have an end you actually reach; here, most candidates run out of time before the last question, so 'later' usually never arrives — and the navigation itself costs seconds. The discipline that separates high scorers on this format is not being cleverer on hard questions, it is abandoning them fast enough to bank the easy ones further down the paper.

Answer: B. MANUSCRIPT

🐱 State the relation first: pruning removes excess from a branch to improve the plant. Editing removes excess from a manuscript. WRITER is the person doing it, not the thing acted on — a different grammatical role entirely, and the most common way analogy questions catch people. PUBLISH is a later stage in the process, and IMPROVE is the purpose rather than the object. Only MANUSCRIPT occupies the same slot in the sentence that BRANCH occupied.

Answer: B. Guarded

🐱 Candid means openly and directly honest, so its opposite is holding back — guarded. Blunt and sincere are the trap pair, because both sit close to candid in meaning rather than opposite to it, and under time pressure a word that is merely related reads as a match. Naive is the subtler distractor: it shares the flavour of unguardedness without being about disclosure at all. When an antonym question is hard, it is usually faster to eliminate the near-synonyms first than to reason forward to the answer.

Answer: B. $100

🐱 $80 is 80% of the original, so the original is 80 ÷ 0.8 = $100. The $96 option is what you get by adding 20% to $80, and it is the single most common wrong answer to this shape of question — it treats the discounted price as the base when the question defines the original price as the base. A useful check that costs two seconds: 20% of $100 is $20, and $100 − $20 = $80. Under time pressure that back-substitution is faster and safer than re-deriving the algebra.

Answer: B. 225

🐱 Reduce to one person for one hour first: 90 ÷ 3 people ÷ 2 hours = 15 boxes per person-hour. Then scale: 5 people × 3 hours × 15 = 225. Doing it in one leap is where errors come from, because it is easy to scale by people and forget the hours, or vice versa — 150 is what you get scaling only the hours, and 270 comes from scaling 90 by 3 and then adding wrongly. The per-unit step feels slower but is faster in practice, because it removes the possibility of losing a factor.

Answer: B. 38

🐱 Write the differences underneath: 3, 5, 7, 9. They are not constant, but they are increasing by a constant 2, so the next difference is 11 and the answer is 27 + 11 = 38. The 36 option is what you get by reusing the last difference (27 + 9), which is the error this question exists to catch — it is what happens when you spot that the gaps are growing but do not check by how much. Writing differences underneath, rather than holding them in your head, is the habit that makes these reliable at speed.

Answer: B. No auditor works in sales

🐱 Auditors sit entirely inside accountants, and accountants are entirely outside sales, so auditors are entirely outside sales. The third and fourth options are the pair worth understanding: both try to run the first statement backwards. 'All auditors are accountants' says nothing about whether there are accountants who are not auditors — there may be many, or none, and the premises do not settle it. Under time pressure the reliable move is to ask of each option 'must this be true given only what I was told', rather than 'does this sound reasonable'.