This is our new series where we go through sample questions and solutions.  Going through these types of questions and understanding the logic behind how questions are ‘worked out’ helps you to hone your reasoning ability and doing so helps you cope better for your test.

While these type of verbal reasoning questions are common in the 11+ exams, you should practice a variety of them for other verbal reasoning type tests such as the NSW high school placement test, ACER scholarship test, VIC Selective Test and even the High School Placement Test (HSPT).

Without any further ado… here’s a question for a verbal reasoning test:

Rearrange the words to make the longest sentence that you can. Write down the remaining word was not used in your sentence.

To rain into wet decided the umbrella river a the woman avoid to getting from jump.

How do we do this?

1) Look at the overall key words - what is a likely sentence that can be written.

Words like umbrella, river, rain refer to wetness.  

2) Look at words you can group together.

Here’s where you now consider the purpose of the word.  So a word like jump would apply to a noun (as it is an action).

Let’s group some words together:

the woman decided, avoid getting wet, to jump into a river.

Ahhh…. so now you can see just by having these three groups you’ve got the gist of your sentence (the meaning).

3) Let’s write it out!

 Here’s my first go:  the woman decided to jump into the river to avoid getting wet from the rain.

Now I’m going to eliminate those that I’ve used so far….

To rain into wet decided the umbrella river a the woman avoid to getting from jump.

Ooops… something’s gone wrong.  The sentence I’ve created requires too many “the” but the only words left are “a”, “umbrella” and “rain”, so I’m going to modify my sentence syntax wise.  Notice I’m not changing the meaning of my sentence but only how it’s worded.  This is important.

Here I go again….

I know that “a” can be used instead of “the” in some cases, so I’m just going to change my sentence slightly to this:

the a woman decided to jump into the river to avoid getting wet from the rain.

This means that I can now cross off all the words

To rain into wet decided the umbrella river a the woman avoid to getting from jump.

And so the remaining word left is “UMBRELLA”

So the answer is:

SENTENCE: a woman decided to jump into the river to avoid getting wet from the rain.

REMAINING WORD: umbrella

It’s interesting to note that the word umbrella is closely related to the word “rain” but the key thing here was the word “JUMP” which lent itself to solving this sentence.

There is a special rule in web programming call DRY - which means do not repeat yourself and along with code that can solve a program using the least amount of lines.

Try to implement that in your reasoning.  See how there were 3 main steps to me coming to this answer.  Overall key words, grouping and then writing.

Clean reasoning uses the least lines possible to solve the problem, try it yourself.

Comment below to see what other sentences are possible with this…. also do you know the background of this sentence?  It’s an interesting one… again, comment below :-)