Verbal Reasoning Test - Ideas/Advice

[Jim123]

Evening all,

I'm sitting one of these this coming Friday for First Group for a shunters position and i just cannot get to grips with it. The spelling, word association etc i'm fine with but it's the part where you read a passage and then have to answer true, false, not enough information to say.

For the life of me i can't get this part right.
I'm not a complete idiot, I have a good grasp of English (A-level standard) but it just won't budge in my head. I've been reading a broadsheet newspaper for a while now so i have that covered but was wondering if anyone else had any tips for cracking this one.

Thanks in advance!

 

[bystander]

It's ages since I've done one of these (and never for the railway) but as I remember, what you have to do is look at a hypothesis for each statement and then tick off whether or not it can be proved. Eg "English people visit France to go on holiday":

1 - Many English people visit France on holiday. T/F/Not enough
2 - English people only visit France because they are going on holiday. T/F/Not enough.

What you have to do is look for the alternatives. What is the phrase telling you? Just use the words given and pay attention to what they denote - and also, crucially, what is true but what isn't said.

So in this case, there must be other people, because the counting word is not given but just a collective noun ("[the] English"), but you don't know how many or few go. And it doesn't say "All the English [people]" So the answer would be Not Enough.

Then, there is no inference that the sole reason that people visit France is to go on holiday (it doesn't say ONLY or ALWAYS or JUST in there, simply put) and you can envisage the other reasons (business, arrest warrant, sex tourism, whatever). So that one must be False - it's binary, an on-off - they either "only" go for that reason, or they go for "that reason and for other ones". You have enough information to deduce that it's False.

I hope that helps. It is an knack, but you can apply yourself using the above rules. Hopefully someone else who is better at expressing themselves can explain further too.

 

[Jim123]

Thanks for this.....much appreciated!

 

[TDK]

These sort of assessment are testing your ability to decipher the question, the key to these is to remember what you have answered and to be "COMPLETELY" honest in your answers as you will fid as you go through the assessment many questions will be duplicated and reworded. If you are inconsistant with your answers to the questions that are similar it does not look good - please accept my apology if I am talking about a different type of assessment!

Also I think the assessment is timed!