Verbal reasoning questions hand you a short factual passage, then a statement, and ask for one of three verdicts: True if the passage forces the statement, False if the passage contradicts it, Cannot Say if the passage does neither. The format looks like reading comprehension but is really an exercise in discipline — the test is whether you can stop your own knowledge and assumptions from leaking into the verdict.
Employers use this format because the failure mode it catches is expensive: people who read a plausible claim and treat it as established. Most wrong answers are exactly that — statements which are probably true in the real world but which the passage, read strictly, does not settle. The three-verdict scale exists to separate 'the passage says so' from 'I happen to believe it.'
Work the four sets in order — each teaches one part of the standard, and the traps compound. If you would rather meet these questions cold with a clock running, the timed verbal reasoning test sets the same twenty at one minute per question and reports your accuracy when you submit.
Prefer to sit it against the clock?
The same twenty questions run as a timed paper — 20 minutes, no feedback until you submit, then a score report. Sitting it before reading these explanations gives you an honest baseline.
Take the 20-minute verbal testFour sets, four judgment skills
Set 1 · What earns a True
6 questionsA True verdict is earned only when the statement follows from what the passage says — by restatement, arithmetic, or a step of logic the text itself licenses. 'Consistent with the passage' is not enough; plenty of false statements are consistent with any short text. As you work this set, notice what the True answers have in common: each one can be traced back to specific words in the passage, not to an impression of it.
The discipline: True means the passage forces the statement — not that the statement is reasonable, likely, or consistent with the passage.
Q1
PASSAGE: When Larkfield rebuilt Wexley Road in 2021, it narrowed the four traffic lanes to three and put a protected cycle lane in the space recovered. Counts taken at the same junction every September show daily cycle trips along the road rising from 1,400 in 2020 to 3,900 in 2024. Average car journey times along the two-kilometre stretch increased by 40 seconds over the same period. The transport committee has since approved protected lanes on two further roads. A report to the committee noted that collisions involving cyclists on Wexley Road fell by a third after the rebuild.
STATEMENT: The protected cycle lane caused the fall in collisions involving cyclists.
- ATrue — it follows from the passage
- BFalse — it contradicts the passage
- CCannot say — the passage does not settle it
▶Show verdict & explanation
Verdict: C. Cannot say — the passage does not settle it
🐱 The report says collisions fell after the rebuild — a sequence, not a cause. Several other things in the same rebuild could have produced or contributed to the fall, such as slower traffic on the narrowed carriageway, or a change in how collisions were recorded. The passage neither establishes the causal claim nor rules it out. 'False' would be wrong because nothing here contradicts it. Quietly upgrading 'after' into 'because' is the single most common way marks are lost on these tests.
Q2
PASSAGE: When Larkfield rebuilt Wexley Road in 2021, it narrowed the four traffic lanes to three and put a protected cycle lane in the space recovered. Counts taken at the same junction every September show daily cycle trips along the road rising from 1,400 in 2020 to 3,900 in 2024. Average car journey times along the two-kilometre stretch increased by 40 seconds over the same period. The transport committee has since approved protected lanes on two further roads. A report to the committee noted that collisions involving cyclists on Wexley Road fell by a third after the rebuild.
STATEMENT: More cycle trips were made daily along Wexley Road in 2024 than in 2020.
- ATrue — it follows from the passage
- BFalse — it contradicts the passage
- CCannot say — the passage does not settle it
▶Show verdict & explanation
Verdict: A. True — it follows from the passage
🐱 The counts are given directly: 1,400 daily trips in 2020 and 3,900 in 2024. The statement does nothing but restate that comparison in other words — which is what a 'True' answer usually looks like here: modest, and adding nothing. If a statement feels as though it adds something to the passage, that is the cue to look at 'Cannot say' instead.
Q3
PASSAGE: A research group at Denholm Business School tracked 62 software teams for eighteen months. Each team was classified as fully co-located, fully remote, or hybrid. The group found no difference between the three arrangements in the number of features shipped per quarter. Fully remote teams reported the highest satisfaction with their working hours; co-located teams reported the highest satisfaction with the quality of feedback from colleagues. The study did not measure staff turnover. Its authors note that all 62 teams came from companies with more than 500 employees, and that teams chose their own arrangement rather than being assigned one.
STATEMENT: Fully remote teams shipped more features per quarter than co-located teams.
- ATrue — it follows from the passage
- BFalse — it contradicts the passage
- CCannot say — the passage does not settle it
▶Show verdict & explanation
Verdict: B. False — it contradicts the passage
🐱 The passage states there was no difference between the three arrangements in features shipped per quarter, which contradicts the statement outright. Keep 'Cannot say' for questions the passage leaves open; this one it closes explicitly. The satisfaction findings that follow are about working hours and feedback, not output, and do not reopen it.
Q4
PASSAGE: A research group at Denholm Business School tracked 62 software teams for eighteen months. Each team was classified as fully co-located, fully remote, or hybrid. The group found no difference between the three arrangements in the number of features shipped per quarter. Fully remote teams reported the highest satisfaction with their working hours; co-located teams reported the highest satisfaction with the quality of feedback from colleagues. The study did not measure staff turnover. Its authors note that all 62 teams came from companies with more than 500 employees, and that teams chose their own arrangement rather than being assigned one.
STATEMENT: Staff turnover was lower in hybrid teams than in fully remote teams.
- ATrue — it follows from the passage
- BFalse — it contradicts the passage
- CCannot say — the passage does not settle it
▶Show verdict & explanation
Verdict: C. Cannot say — the passage does not settle it
🐱 The passage says in as many words that the study did not measure staff turnover, so it can neither support nor contradict the comparison. Not measuring something is not the same as finding no difference in it — that is exactly the confusion this item tests. 'False' would require the passage to state something incompatible with the claim, and it states nothing at all about turnover.
Q5
PASSAGE: Restoring a drained peat bog means blocking the ditches that were cut to dry it out. On the Fenmoor estate, 240 hectares were re-wetted between 2018 and 2022 by installing more than 3,000 peat dams. Water tables across the treated area now sit within 10 centimetres of the surface for most of the year, against 40 centimetres before the work. Sphagnum moss, which forms new peat, has recolonised roughly 60 percent of the treated area. The estate has not re-wetted the remaining 180 hectares of drained bog on its land, and no decision about those hectares has been announced.
STATEMENT: Before the restoration work began, the estate had more than 400 hectares of drained peat bog.
- ATrue — it follows from the passage
- BFalse — it contradicts the passage
- CCannot say — the passage does not settle it
▶Show verdict & explanation
Verdict: A. True — it follows from the passage
🐱 240 hectares were re-wetted and 180 hectares of drained bog remain, so the estate began with 420 hectares of drained bog — more than 400. The arithmetic is the whole question and is worth doing rather than eyeballing: the two figures sit in different sentences and the total never appears in the passage.
Q6
PASSAGE: Restoring a drained peat bog means blocking the ditches that were cut to dry it out. On the Fenmoor estate, 240 hectares were re-wetted between 2018 and 2022 by installing more than 3,000 peat dams. Water tables across the treated area now sit within 10 centimetres of the surface for most of the year, against 40 centimetres before the work. Sphagnum moss, which forms new peat, has recolonised roughly 60 percent of the treated area. The estate has not re-wetted the remaining 180 hectares of drained bog on its land, and no decision about those hectares has been announced.
STATEMENT: Sphagnum moss has recolonised the whole of the treated area at Fenmoor.
- ATrue — it follows from the passage
- BFalse — it contradicts the passage
- CCannot say — the passage does not settle it
▶Show verdict & explanation
Verdict: B. False — it contradicts the passage
🐱 The passage puts recolonisation at roughly 60 percent of the treated area, which contradicts 'the whole of it'. Read the quantifiers as carefully as the numbers: 'roughly 60 percent' and 'all' cannot both be true of the same area, so this is a contradiction rather than a gap.
Set 2 · What earns a False
4 questionsFalse is the narrowest verdict and the most misused. A statement the passage never mentions is not False — it is Cannot Say. False must be earned by contradiction: the passage asserts something incompatible with the statement. The reliable check is to ask, 'which sentence of the passage would have to be wrong for this statement to be right?' If you can point to it, False; if you cannot, you are guessing.
The discipline: False means the passage contradicts the statement — absence of support is not contradiction.
Q7
PASSAGE: Researchers at the Kestrel Field Station studied how young zebra finches learn songs. Birds that heard a tutor song during the day and then slept undisturbed reproduced it more accurately a week later than birds whose sleep was interrupted every twenty minutes through the night. Both groups heard the tutor song the same number of times. Birds in the interrupted group ate the same amount and gained weight at the same rate as the others. The researchers did not test whether the difference persists beyond one week, and they studied only male finches.
STATEMENT: The difference in song accuracy between the two groups was still present a month after the tutoring.
- ATrue — it follows from the passage
- BFalse — it contradicts the passage
- CCannot say — the passage does not settle it
▶Show verdict & explanation
Verdict: C. Cannot say — the passage does not settle it
🐱 The passage says the researchers did not test whether the difference persists beyond one week, so nothing here settles what happens at a month. The pull towards 'False' comes from a sense that an untested claim must be unsupported and therefore wrong — but unsupported and false are different verdicts, and only a passage that contradicts the statement earns 'False'.
Q8
PASSAGE: Researchers at the Kestrel Field Station studied how young zebra finches learn songs. Birds that heard a tutor song during the day and then slept undisturbed reproduced it more accurately a week later than birds whose sleep was interrupted every twenty minutes through the night. Both groups heard the tutor song the same number of times. Birds in the interrupted group ate the same amount and gained weight at the same rate as the others. The researchers did not test whether the difference persists beyond one week, and they studied only male finches.
STATEMENT: Birds whose sleep was interrupted heard the tutor song fewer times than birds that slept undisturbed.
- ATrue — it follows from the passage
- BFalse — it contradicts the passage
- CCannot say — the passage does not settle it
▶Show verdict & explanation
Verdict: B. False — it contradicts the passage
🐱 The passage states that both groups heard the tutor song the same number of times, which contradicts the statement. This is the kind of item where the surrounding detail — the interruptions, the feeding, the one-week limit — invites you to reason about what probably happened; the answer is settled by one plain sentence, and looking for it is faster than reasoning about it.
Q9
PASSAGE: Between March and August, the Halstow supermarket chain moved its own-brand pasta from the bottom shelf to eye level in 40 of its 210 stores, leaving the other 170 unchanged. In the 40 trial stores, own-brand pasta sales rose 26 percent while sales of branded pasta in the same aisle fell 9 percent; total pasta sales in those stores rose 4 percent. In the 170 unchanged stores, total pasta sales over the same months rose 3 percent. The chain has not published the shelf position of branded pasta in any store, and the trial did not vary prices.
STATEMENT: In the trial stores, own-brand pasta sales rose by a larger percentage than the percentage by which branded pasta sales fell.
- ATrue — it follows from the passage
- BFalse — it contradicts the passage
- CCannot say — the passage does not settle it
▶Show verdict & explanation
Verdict: A. True — it follows from the passage
🐱 26 percent up against 9 percent down: the rise is the larger of the two percentages, and the passage gives both figures directly. Note how carefully the statement is worded — it compares percentages, not quantities. Had it compared numbers of packets sold, the passage would not settle it, because no volumes are given anywhere.
Q10
PASSAGE: Between March and August, the Halstow supermarket chain moved its own-brand pasta from the bottom shelf to eye level in 40 of its 210 stores, leaving the other 170 unchanged. In the 40 trial stores, own-brand pasta sales rose 26 percent while sales of branded pasta in the same aisle fell 9 percent; total pasta sales in those stores rose 4 percent. In the 170 unchanged stores, total pasta sales over the same months rose 3 percent. The chain has not published the shelf position of branded pasta in any store, and the trial did not vary prices.
STATEMENT: Branded pasta was displayed at eye level in the 170 unchanged stores.
- ATrue — it follows from the passage
- BFalse — it contradicts the passage
- CCannot say — the passage does not settle it
▶Show verdict & explanation
Verdict: C. Cannot say — the passage does not settle it
🐱 The passage says outright that the chain has not published the shelf position of branded pasta in any store, so the statement cannot be settled either way. It is tempting to infer that branded pasta must have held the eye-level slot because own-brand pasta was moved up into it — but an aisle has more than one eye-level facing, and the passage never says whose space was taken.
Set 3 · Cannot Say, held honestly
6 questionsThis is where outside knowledge does its damage. The statement sounds right, agrees with common sense, and may well be true in the world — but the passage does not settle it, and the honest verdict is Cannot Say. The discipline runs both directions: resist upgrading plausible statements to True, and resist downgrading unlikely ones to False. The passage is the entire universe; nothing outside it exists for the duration of the question.
The discipline: Cannot Say means the passage neither establishes nor contradicts the statement — however plausible it sounds.
Q11
PASSAGE: The Rowanbeck causeway is a raised timber track crossing what was once marshland. Tree-ring dating puts the felling of its oak planks in a single winter, between 704 and 703 BC. The track runs for 1.2 kilometres and is a little under two metres wide. Excavators recovered 19 wooden pegs, a broken axe head and several hazel hurdles from beneath the planks. No settlement has been found at either end of the causeway, though only the eastern end has been excavated; the western end lies beneath a road built in the 1930s.
STATEMENT: There was no settlement at the western end of the causeway.
- ATrue — it follows from the passage
- BFalse — it contradicts the passage
- CCannot say — the passage does not settle it
▶Show verdict & explanation
Verdict: C. Cannot say — the passage does not settle it
🐱 Only the eastern end has been excavated, and the western end lies beneath a 1930s road. So 'no settlement has been found' at the western end is a statement about what has been looked for, not about what is there. Absence of evidence from a site nobody has dug settles nothing, which is why this is Cannot say rather than True.
Q12
PASSAGE: The Rowanbeck causeway is a raised timber track crossing what was once marshland. Tree-ring dating puts the felling of its oak planks in a single winter, between 704 and 703 BC. The track runs for 1.2 kilometres and is a little under two metres wide. Excavators recovered 19 wooden pegs, a broken axe head and several hazel hurdles from beneath the planks. No settlement has been found at either end of the causeway, though only the eastern end has been excavated; the western end lies beneath a road built in the 1930s.
STATEMENT: All of the causeway's oak planks came from trees felled within a single winter.
- ATrue — it follows from the passage
- BFalse — it contradicts the passage
- CCannot say — the passage does not settle it
▶Show verdict & explanation
Verdict: A. True — it follows from the passage
🐱 Tree-ring dating puts the felling of its oak planks in a single winter; the statement restates that and adds nothing. Answers like this often feel too absolute to be right, but the passage genuinely licenses the absolute wording. Refusing to accept what the text actually says costs just as many marks as accepting more than it says.
Q13
PASSAGE: Marlow Couriers guarantees next-day delivery for parcels booked before 4 p.m. Last year the company met that guarantee on 96 percent of eligible parcels. Parcels booked after 4 p.m. carry no guarantee, and about a fifth of the company's volume falls into that category. Marlow operates 14 depots; the two largest, at Ferndale and Otterton, together handle 45 percent of all parcels. The company refunds the postage on any guaranteed parcel delivered late, and it issued such refunds on 4 percent of guaranteed parcels last year. Marlow does not publish on-time figures for individual depots.
STATEMENT: Marlow Couriers delivered every guaranteed parcel on time last year.
- ATrue — it follows from the passage
- BFalse — it contradicts the passage
- CCannot say — the passage does not settle it
▶Show verdict & explanation
Verdict: B. False — it contradicts the passage
🐱 Ninety-six percent is not every parcel, so the passage contradicts the statement. There is a second contradiction in the same passage: refunds, payable only on a late guaranteed parcel, were issued on 4 percent of them. Either sentence on its own is enough for a confident False.
Q14
PASSAGE: Marlow Couriers guarantees next-day delivery for parcels booked before 4 p.m. Last year the company met that guarantee on 96 percent of eligible parcels. Parcels booked after 4 p.m. carry no guarantee, and about a fifth of the company's volume falls into that category. Marlow operates 14 depots; the two largest, at Ferndale and Otterton, together handle 45 percent of all parcels. The company refunds the postage on any guaranteed parcel delivered late, and it issued such refunds on 4 percent of guaranteed parcels last year. Marlow does not publish on-time figures for individual depots.
STATEMENT: Some parcels covered by Marlow's guarantee were delivered late last year.
- ATrue — it follows from the passage
- BFalse — it contradicts the passage
- CCannot say — the passage does not settle it
▶Show verdict & explanation
Verdict: A. True — it follows from the passage
🐱 Two independent routes give the same answer: the guarantee was met on 96 percent of eligible parcels, leaving 4 percent that it was not; and refunds — issued only when a guaranteed parcel is late — went out on 4 percent of them. When two separate sentences converge like this, it is a good sign the reading is right.
Q15
PASSAGE: A study at Brookmere College asked 1,200 first-year students to record how they revised for end-of-term exams. Students who tested themselves on the material scored on average 7 marks higher out of 100 than students who only re-read their notes, and the gap was similar across all four subjects in the study. Students who tested themselves also reported spending less total time revising. The study relied on students' own accounts of their revision, collected after the exams. Prior attainment was not recorded, so the researchers could not check whether the two groups were equally strong before the term began.
STATEMENT: The two groups of students were equally strong academically before the term began.
- ATrue — it follows from the passage
- BFalse — it contradicts the passage
- CCannot say — the passage does not settle it
▶Show verdict & explanation
Verdict: C. Cannot say — the passage does not settle it
🐱 The passage says prior attainment was not recorded and that the researchers could not check this — about as clear a signal for Cannot say as these tests give. Note what the passage does not say: it does not claim the groups differed. A study flagging a gap in its own evidence is not thereby asserting the opposite of the statement.
Q16
PASSAGE: A study at Brookmere College asked 1,200 first-year students to record how they revised for end-of-term exams. Students who tested themselves on the material scored on average 7 marks higher out of 100 than students who only re-read their notes, and the gap was similar across all four subjects in the study. Students who tested themselves also reported spending less total time revising. The study relied on students' own accounts of their revision, collected after the exams. Prior attainment was not recorded, so the researchers could not check whether the two groups were equally strong before the term began.
STATEMENT: Students who tested themselves spent more time revising in total than students who only re-read their notes.
- ATrue — it follows from the passage
- BFalse — it contradicts the passage
- CCannot say — the passage does not settle it
▶Show verdict & explanation
Verdict: B. False — it contradicts the passage
🐱 The passage reports that the self-testing students spent less total time revising, so the statement is contradicted. The word carrying the weight is 'total': it matches the passage's own wording, which closes off any reading on which they spent longer on some particular part of revision.
Set 4 · The wording traps
4 questionsThe final set concentrates the traps: a statement that stretches 'most' into 'all', a comparative the passage never makes, a causal claim built on the passage's mere correlation. One word is usually the difference between True and Cannot Say. Read statements at the same strictness you would a contract — every quantifier, every 'because', every superlative is load-bearing, and the test writers know exactly which ones you will skim past.
The discipline: Scope words (all, only, never), comparatives, and causal claims — where verdicts flip on a single word.
Q17
PASSAGE: Self-healing concrete contains dormant bacteria and a calcium compound sealed in tiny capsules. When a crack opens and water reaches the capsules, the bacteria revive, consume the compound and deposit limestone, sealing cracks up to about 0.8 millimetres wide. In a three-year trial on a canal lock wall at Wettering, treated panels developed the same number of cracks as untreated panels, but 71 percent of the cracks in treated panels had closed by the end of the trial, against 4 percent in untreated panels. Self-healing concrete currently costs roughly twice as much per cubic metre as ordinary concrete.
STATEMENT: Treated panels in the Wettering trial developed fewer cracks than untreated panels.
- ATrue — it follows from the passage
- BFalse — it contradicts the passage
- CCannot say — the passage does not settle it
▶Show verdict & explanation
Verdict: B. False — it contradicts the passage
🐱 The passage says treated panels developed the same number of cracks; the difference lay in how many of them closed afterwards. The statement is therefore contradicted. The trap is that the trial was plainly a success, which makes 'fewer cracks' feel as though it must be part of the result — the concrete seals cracks, it does not prevent them.
Q18
PASSAGE: Self-healing concrete contains dormant bacteria and a calcium compound sealed in tiny capsules. When a crack opens and water reaches the capsules, the bacteria revive, consume the compound and deposit limestone, sealing cracks up to about 0.8 millimetres wide. In a three-year trial on a canal lock wall at Wettering, treated panels developed the same number of cracks as untreated panels, but 71 percent of the cracks in treated panels had closed by the end of the trial, against 4 percent in untreated panels. Self-healing concrete currently costs roughly twice as much per cubic metre as ordinary concrete.
STATEMENT: In the Wettering trial, more than two thirds of the cracks in treated panels had closed by the end.
- ATrue — it follows from the passage
- BFalse — it contradicts the passage
- CCannot say — the passage does not settle it
▶Show verdict & explanation
Verdict: A. True — it follows from the passage
🐱 Two thirds is 66.7 percent and the passage reports 71 percent, so the statement follows. Items like this reward converting the fraction to a percentage rather than judging by feel: the two figures are close enough that a guess could land either way, and the 4 percent for untreated panels is there to distract.
Q19
PASSAGE: The Ardleigh community wind turbine has been running since 2015. It generated 2.1 gigawatt-hours in its first full year and 2.0 gigawatt-hours last year. Under the scheme's rules, all profits after maintenance go to a local grants fund, which has awarded £310,000 to 84 village projects since the turbine opened. The turbine is owned by 640 local shareholders, none of whom may hold more than 5 percent of the shares. Maintenance in 2023 required the turbine to be shut down for eleven days, the longest outage so far. The fund's committee is elected each year at a public meeting.
STATEMENT: No single shareholder owns more than 5 percent of the Ardleigh turbine.
- ATrue — it follows from the passage
- BFalse — it contradicts the passage
- CCannot say — the passage does not settle it
▶Show verdict & explanation
Verdict: A. True — it follows from the passage
🐱 The passage states the rule directly: no shareholder may hold more than 5 percent of the shares. The statement restates it. The other numbers in the passage — 640 shareholders, 84 projects, eleven days, two gigawatt-hours — are there to slow you down, and none of them bears on this one.
Q20
PASSAGE: The Ardleigh community wind turbine has been running since 2015. It generated 2.1 gigawatt-hours in its first full year and 2.0 gigawatt-hours last year. Under the scheme's rules, all profits after maintenance go to a local grants fund, which has awarded £310,000 to 84 village projects since the turbine opened. The turbine is owned by 640 local shareholders, none of whom may hold more than 5 percent of the shares. Maintenance in 2023 required the turbine to be shut down for eleven days, the longest outage so far. The fund's committee is elected each year at a public meeting.
STATEMENT: The turbine has been shut down for maintenance in every year since 2015.
- ATrue — it follows from the passage
- BFalse — it contradicts the passage
- CCannot say — the passage does not settle it
▶Show verdict & explanation
Verdict: C. Cannot say — the passage does not settle it
🐱 Calling the 2023 shutdown 'the longest outage so far' implies there were others, but it does not tell you there was one in every year — there could have been three outages in a decade, or nine. The passage supports 'at least one other outage'; it neither supports nor denies 'one every year', which is precisely the Cannot say verdict.