Selective Test – Thinking Skill (TS01)

Bunning Hardware Store selling the paint I want at 3 tins for the price of 2. This weekend I can get a further 10% off with my loyalty card. What will be the overall reduction from the full price if I buy three tins of paint this weekend?

Hattie knew that 5 people wanted tea: 3 with milk, 2 with sugar. Unfortunately, she did not know how many wanted both milk and sugar. Which of the following would enable her to make the right 5 drinks, even if she could not work out which was for whom?

A water company is laying a new water pipeline between two towns, Sydney and Canberra, which are 10 kilometres apart. The company decides to start laying the pipes from both ends so that the two teams will meet up somewhere in between. Team A is made up of five workers and two diggers, laying pipes at the rate of 500 metres a day, and will start from Sydney. Team Bis made up of three workers and one digger, laying pipes at the rate of 200 metres a day, and will start from Canberra. What distance from Sydney and on which day will both teams meet?

Thomas is designing a puzzle made of four pieces. Each piece is made of three squares and when they are put together correctly they will form a 3 x 4 grid of squares. The design will also have two lines of symmetry. Three of the pieces are shown below.

Which of the following could be the final piece?

A farmer has a field, one straight edge of which is against a vertical upward cliff. He wants to fence off a rectangular area for some cattle. He has twenty 2 m fencing panels.

Which of the following graphs, if suitably labelled, correctly shows the relationship of the width of the fenced off portion of the field to the area?

I took part in a quiz last night. There were 40 questions. Each correct answer scored 2 points, with I point deducted for every wrong answer. There was no penalty for questions that were not attempted.

The winning team scored 57 points. The runners-up scored 54 points, despite having 2 more correct answers than the winners.

How many wrong answers did the runners-up have?

Patrick is a student taking her examinations. Her first examination is on Wednesday 16 May and she has one examination each day for 16 days. There are no examinations on Tuesdays, Saturdays or Sundays.

What is the day and date of her final examination?

A fleet of UFOs was observed, and pictures taken of them at the same time from different places: one looking from the north and the other looking from the west.

What is the largest number of UFOs that could be in the fleet?

Barry took driving lessons during December to April The number of driving lessons he took each month, and the total amount of money he spent on driving lessons each  month, are shown in the graphs below. The driving instructor charges a fixed amount for each driving lesson, but at the beginning of one month he increased the price per lesson.  

In which month was the cost of a driving lesson increased?

A company decides to give bouquets of flowers to its top 15 female employees. Each bouquet is to consist of 10 cream roses and 2 lilac roses. The roses are supplied by a garden nursery in boxes containing only cream roses and lilac roses. Each box contains at least 30 roses and at most 36 roses in total. The nursery is able to guarantee that each box contains at least 8 lilac roses and at most 12 lilac roses. What is the minimum number of boxes of roses that the company needs to buy in order to ensure that it has a sufficient number of each colour of rose to make the required bouquets?

Mary works in a top secret research laboratory. In order to gain access to the building, she must use a secret four-digit code. All codes from 0000 to 9999 are possible. As a security feature.

Mary is required to get exactly one digit wrong each time, and not to enter the same four-digit number as she did last time.

The security guard can see the numbers that she enters into the keypad.

What is the maximum number of different four-digit numbers Mary can enter without the security guard being able to be certain of the secret code?

This is part of a tiled wall in my house that has a regular, repeating pattern. Nine tiles have fallen off the wall and broken, leaving a square space.

This is part of a tiled wall in my house that has a regular, repeating pattern. Nine tiles have fallen off the wall and broken, leaving a square space. Which one of the following tiles could be used to replace the central tile of the group of

The piece of cardboard shown below folds to form a house for use with a model railway.

The other side of the cardboard is black, which forms the inside of the house. Which of the illustrations below correctly shows the assembled house?

Kate was asked to draw a bar chart for her homework, but she drew the pie chart shown below.

Assuming that her pie chart correctly represents the data, which of the following should Kate have drawn?

Giles works at his local shop in his spare time. He always works for a whole number of hours, but receives a different rate of pay for working at weekends than in the week (both pay rates are a whole number of dollars per hour). Giles has worked for the same number of hours in each of the

last two weeks, but his pay was $67 in the first week and $79 in the second week.

Which of the following could not explain Giles’s pay in the last two weeks?

4050 charity leaflets need to be packed into envelopes. Yesterday 3 people worked for 1 hour and packed 450 leaflets altogether. They all worked at the same rate. Continuing the job today, they have an extra person to help and they start work at 8.00 am. Everyone today works at the same rate as the people did yesterday. If they do not take any breaks, at what time will they finish the job?

The following table shows the distribution of boys and girls amongst the 60 households of Sibb Road.

Which one of the following pie charts shows the distribution of children amongst the households of Sibb Road?

I have a 24-hour digital clock beside my bed which shows times from 00:00 to 23:59. When I woke up during the night, I noticed, to my surprise, that the product of the two hours digits was the same as the product of the two minutes digits. None of them was a zero. Not counting times which include a zero, or where the hours and minutes use exactly the same digits (e.g. 12:21 ), how many times does this happen during a 24-hour period?

Deena takes 15 minutes to cycle to school, and her brother Callum walks there taking 30 minutes. Normally. Deena leaves home 6 minutes after Callum. For how long does Deena cycle until she catches up with Callum?

50 students were asked whether they enjoy TV and whether they enjoy rock climbing.The results are given below.

Which of the following statements is not correct?

Colin said to Bill that the sum of the digits in his 3-figure house number was 12, and each digit was bigger than the one to the left of it. Bill said that was not enough information for him to work out the number.

Which one of the following additional pieces of information, on its own, would enable Bill to workout Colin’s house number?

On a television game show, four contestants compete in four rounds. Each round is worth a number of points between 1 and 10, and each contestant scores either 0 or the full amount available in each round. No two rounds are worth the same amount. The winner gets a prize of $100 for each point that could have been scored. At the end of the competition, the contestants have scores of 27, 25, 24 and 14.

What was the total prize money for this game?

A company offers one of their salespeople the choice of two pay deals. Deal 1: 46 hours per week including 9 hours overtime – paid at $5 per hour, with overtime paid at $10 per hour. Deal 2: Basic weekly pay of $50 plus commission of 1/50 of the weekly sales, but not on the first $5000 of sales. lithe person makes sales of $15000 in a week, what is the best weekly pay that can be earned?

The results of the recent competition between the four houses of the local school were as follows:

Which of the following, if correctly labelled, could represent the number of points scored by each house?

Thomas is designing a puzzle made of four pieces. Each piece is made of three squares and when they are put together correctly they will form a 3 x 4 grid of squares. The design will also have two lines of symmetry. Three of the pieces are shown below.

Which of the following could be the final piece?

When I picked up a bottle of washing up liquid at the supermarket yesterday, I noticed that the label on the shelf had been changed from 45 cents per 100 ml to 60 cents per 100 ml since my last purchase. On closer inspection, I realised that not only had the price increased, but also the volume of the bottle had been reduced.

Which one of the following could explain the increase of the cost of the washing up liquid per 100 ml from 45 cents to 60 cents?

When Mary won $3360 on a TV quiz programme she decided to give it to her two grand children,

Susan and Luke, to be shared between them in the ratio of their ages.

5-year-old Luke complained that it wasn’t fair that his older sister should get more than him. His mother sympathised, but told him to be thankful that his grandmother hadn’t won the money next month (after Susan’s birthday) when he would have received $70 less, or last month (before his birthday) when he would have received $160 less.

How much of Mary’s $3360 did Luke receive?

A large rectangular poster showing a black triangle is made up from four smaller rectangular pieces.

Which one of the pieces has been printed incorrectly?

The local science museum needs to raise a certain amount of money every week to pay its running costs. The entrance fee is $10 for adults and $8 for children. Last week 140 adults and 100 children visited the museum and the money raised from their entrance fees was just enough to cover the running costs.

This week however the running costs will be $100 more than last week. Tine assumes that the same number of people will visit this week, and so has decided to increase the entrance fee to $12 for adults and $9 for children. She is also going to introduce a family ticket, which will admit 2 adults and 2 children. She predicts that 40 of these family tickets will be sold.

What is the cheapest price for the family ticket that will raise the required amount of money?

Monthly new car sales of the Spaghini 2000 during 2016 are shown in the table below.

Toni is asked to produce a chart showing what, at the end of each month, the average monthly sales were for the year so far. Which of the following is the chart Toni should produce?

The individual digits on my digital clock appear as words rather than numerals. For example, at 18:07 the display is as shown below.

How many times each day does the letter E not appear on the display?

Statistics for the Bolandian steam tram system are shown below (figures are for the year 2010): Total track length: 180 km Number of stops: 48 Individual passenger journeys: 420 000 Total tram km: 1.2 million Total water consumption: 20000 cubic metres Average time between stops: 8 minutes Which of the following additional pieces of information would make it possible to calculate the average length of an individual journey?

Escherman’s digital counters have a four-digit display. When a I appears in either of the two right-hand digits, it is shown by blocking out the two bars on the right; when a 1 appears in either of the two left-hand digits, it is shown by blocking out the two bars on the left. This gives their displays a pleasing symmetry, as shown below.

How many numbers between 1501 and 9999 will have a vertical line of symmetry?

Harry visits his mother every Sunday. He catches a train from Newtown Station to Burwood Station which is a 10-minute bus ride from his mother’s house. There are two trains an hour. One is a stopping train taking 35 minutes and the other is a direct train taking 20 minutes. Both buses and trains run every half hour. He finds that whichever train he catches, his journey time from catching the train to arriving at his mother’s (including any wait tor the bus) is always 55 minutes. Assuming the trains and buses run on time, which of the following would account for the above?

Ying wants to tile his kitchen floor and is Hying to decide between his four favourite tiles. 1-lowever, only three of them are suitable for the job as one of them wont cover the floor without leaving numerous gaps.

Which one is it?

Andy, Ben, Charlie and Dan arc the usual four members of a rowing crew. Dan injures his leg and is unable to row. He is replaced in the crew by Eddie. The average weight of the new crew, consisting of Andy, Ben, Charlie and Eddie, is 2 kg less than the average weight of the original crew. Which one of the following additional pieces of information is not sufficient to find Eddie’s weight?

The table shows the numbers of people taking driving tests and the number failing.

Which of the following charts represents the percentage of passes in each area?

Five friends are waiting in a queue. Peter is shorter than Quentin. Tom is shorter than Peter. Mary is taller than Tom but Mary is shorter than Quentin. Lucy is shorter than Mary.

Which of the following people cannot be the third-tallest?

Oliver is a frequent visitor to Morel, his favourite restaurant. Since its introduction, Oliver has ordered from the special offer ‘More! For Less’ menu every time.

He has now ordered from this menu 11 times without ever repeating his combination of choices for the three courses. Note that ‘mousse’ and ‘pie’ appear more than once on this menu. In the same meal he doesn’t want to choose pie twice or mousse twice. How many more times can Oliver order from the ‘More! For Less’ menu before he must have a combination he has already eaten?

A hotel wishes to carpet a 2m wide corridor as shown in the diagram below. All measurements are given in metres. The carpet can only be bought 4 metres wide, and whole number multiples of 11 metre in length. When cut and laid, the carpet must fill the corridor without overlapping.

What is the shortest length of carpet that can be bought to satisfy these conditions?