Inductive Reasoning Practice Test (Paper 2): 24 Figures in 12 Minutes

The five-dimension scan

Most people lose figure questions by looking at the whole picture and waiting for a rule to appear. It rarely does, because the eye is drawn to whatever changed most dramatically, and the rule is often the quiet change beside it. The fix is mechanical: check the five dimensions one at a time, in the same order, on every question. Rotation first, because the pointer makes it unambiguous. Then count the dots. Then fill. Then corner. Then shape.

For each dimension, ask one question: from frame 1 to frame 2, did this change, and if so by how much? Then confirm the same change from frame 2 to frame 3. A dimension that changes by the same amount both times is part of the rule. A dimension that stays the same both times is not. A dimension that changes by different amounts is a warning that you have misread something, usually the rotation direction.

The whole scan takes about fifteen seconds once it is habitual, which leaves fifteen to apply the rule and match an option. That is the entire method. It is dull, and that is the point: the papers are designed to punish intuition and reward procedure.

Sequences: apply the rule, then look at the options

Do not read the options before you have applied the rule. If you look at five candidate figures first, one of them will look right, and you will then find a rule that justifies it. That is exactly the wrong-direction slip the distractors are built to catch.

Instead, finish the scan, write the answer in your head as a full figure — filled pentagon, top-left, pointer at 0°, five dots — and only then find the option that matches all five dimensions. If two options match on four dimensions and differ on one, the one you were unsure about is the one the paper is testing. Go back to the frames and check that one dimension only.

• One-rule sequences (rotation only, dots only) should take under twenty seconds.

• Two-rule sequences take the full thirty; the second rule is usually fill or corner, because those are the ones the eye skips.

• Three-rule sequences appear in the last third of the paper. Same scan, no shortcuts; the only difference is that you must not stop after finding two.

Matrices are two sequences crossed

A 3×3 matrix looks like a different kind of question, but it is two sequences sharing a corner. Read the top row left to right as a three-frame sequence and name its rule. Then read the left column top to bottom and name that rule. The missing cell is the bottom-right, so it can be reached two ways: apply the row rule to the bottom-middle cell, or apply the column rule to the middle-right cell.

Do both. If they give the same figure, you have the answer and you have checked it in the same motion. If they disagree, one of your two rules is wrong, and the one that was harder to name is the suspect. This is the only question type on the paper where the check is free, so never skip it.

A common mistake is trying to find one rule that explains the whole grid. There is not one; there are two, and they are independent. The row rule does not know about the column rule.

Odd one out: the rule is a relation, not a property

On this paper the four conforming figures deliberately differ in shape, fill, corner and rotation. So you cannot find the odd one by asking which figure looks different — they all look different. The rule is always a relation between two dimensions: the number of dots equals the number of sides, or the figure is filled exactly when its pointer is vertical, or the dot count matches the corner it sits in.

Method: pick two dimensions, check the relation on all five figures, and count how many satisfy it. Four out of five means you have found the rule and the fifth is the answer. Five out of five means the relation is true but irrelevant. Fewer than four means it is not the rule; try another pair. There are ten pairs of dimensions, but in practice the first two you try — dots against sides, fill against pointer — cover most of what these papers set.

Odd-one-out questions are where candidates spend the most time for the fewest marks. If you have not found the relation in forty seconds, pick the figure that stands out on the dimension you checked last, flag it, and move on.

What each wrong option is telling you

Every distractor on this paper was generated as a specific slip, and the explanation names it. Learn the four, because they are the same four slips you will make on the real thing.

• Wrong direction: the pointer turned anticlockwise when the rule was clockwise, or the figure moved to the previous corner. Caused by reading frames 3 to 1 instead of 1 to 3, or by rotating the frame in your head.

• One step too far: the rule applied twice. Caused by starting the count from frame 3 instead of frame 2, or by counting the question mark as a frame.

• Wrong dimension: the answer with its fill flipped or its shape swapped. Caused by finishing the scan early — you found one rule and assumed the rest stayed constant without checking.

• Stale frame: the last frame repeated unchanged. Caused by running out of time and picking the option that looks most like what you were just looking at.

When the report shows a cluster of one slip type, that is a habit, not bad luck. Wrong-direction clusters mean you should read frames aloud in order. Wrong-dimension clusters mean you are stopping the scan at the first hit.

Pacing twelve minutes

Thirty seconds a question is the average, not the cap. The paper is ordered easy to hard, so the first eight questions should take about fifteen seconds each and bank you two minutes. Spend that surplus on the two-rule sequences and the matrices in the middle third. Reach the last six questions with at least three minutes left.

Hard rules for the clock: never spend more than forty-five seconds on any question, and never leave one blank — there is no penalty for guessing, and a guess informed by a partial scan is right far more often than chance. Flag anything you guessed, and use whatever time remains to revisit flagged questions in order.

If you time out, the report still marks everything you answered. A timed-out paper with 18 correct is worth more to you than a finished paper with 14, because it tells you the accuracy is there and the speed is the only thing left to train.

Reading the report and what to do next

The report splits your score into sequences-and-matrices against odd-one-out, and shows which named slip produced each wrong answer. Three things to look for, in order.

First, the split. If odd-one-out is far below the other tag, you are searching for properties instead of relations; re-read that section above and re-sit. If sequences-and-matrices is the weak tag, the scan is not yet automatic — do ten questions untimed with the five dimensions written on paper beside you, ticking each off.

Second, the slip pattern, as described above. Third, the time: if you finished with minutes to spare and still dropped marks, slow down and run the check on every matrix. If you timed out, sit Paper 1 next — its mixed types at a minute each are a lower-pressure way to make the scan habitual before coming back to the clock here.

Sign in before you start and the score is saved to your account, with a history for this paper alone, so a re-sit next week is measured against this one rather than against memory.