Verbal Reasoning Test

Every statement here has three possible answers and only one of them is interesting. True and False are the answers a reader expects to be scored on. Cannot say is the one the format was built for.

Consider the bird count passage. It says no pochard were recorded on seventeen Sundays one winter. Read that quickly and you come away with pochard have never been seen here, which is a much bigger claim and one nobody made.

That slip has a name outside psychology. Grice described ordinary talk as running on one assumption. A speaker tells you what matters, so a reader treats what is left out as settled rather than as missing. It is a good rule for a conversation and a bad one for a document.

So the headline on this page is not how many you got right. It is how often you and the passage disagreed about whether the passage had an answer at all.

The number counts both directions, and it has to, because counting one of them would make the score easy to fake.

Answer Cannot say to all eighteen statements and you never over-reach once. If the headline only counted over-reaching, that run would read as a perfect score by a reader who did not read. Two thirds of it are ducks instead, and the number says so.

• Over-reaching. The lines do not settle the statement and you answered True or False anyway.
• Ducking. The lines do settle it and you said Cannot say rather than commit.
• A plain mistake. You saw that the passage decides, and picked the wrong side. That one is in your accuracy, not in the headline.

Six passages, and not one of them is about anything. A library reopening, a warehouse move, a bird count, a school cycling scheme, a weekend of engineering work and a Roman brooch.

Dullness is the design. A passage about anything you have a view on stops measuring reading and starts measuring the view. That failure is what the critical thinking test on this site studies on purpose, and what this one has to avoid.

Outside knowledge is a second leak. Write about something a reader might already know and the answer arrives before the passage does. Nothing here can be looked up, because none of it is real.

Each passage carries three statements: one the lines settle as true, one they settle as false, and one they do not settle. That balance is fixed, so a run of four passages is always four unsettled statements out of twelve.

Watson and Glaser put a version of this on paper in the 1960s, in a subtest called Inference. A passage, a set of statements, and a scale running from definitely true to insufficient data.

Graduate schemes and law firms took it from there, and this is now one of the most sat test formats in the world. The publishers own the passages and they own the norms that go with them, and neither is published.

Geis and Zwicky put the underlying error somewhere more surprising: in the grammar. They showed that readers treat if you do this, that happens as though it also promised that nothing else does. A sentence invites a conclusion it never states, and most readers accept the invitation.

Speed is part of a real sitting and it is not part of this one. There is no clock on any statement here. Where speed is the whole score, the site measures it properly, and how processing speed shifts with age is built out of those tasks.

The number on the card is narrow on purpose, and the card carries three more figures so that nothing important hides behind it.

It is not a reading comprehension grade and it is not an English test. It says nothing about vocabulary, and the passages are written in plain words for that reason.

It is not a prediction of how you would do in a graduate sitting. This is the same format, not the same paper, and the two have no shared items and no shared norm.

There are six passages and eighteen statements in the whole pool. A second run repeats most of what you saw the first time, so what improves is your memory of these eighteen statements. That narrow kind of gain is the subject of do brain training games work. Read it before treating a better second score as a better reader.