Working a Stimulus Block

Most of a real paper comes in blocks: one scenario with two to five questions hanging off it. The scenario might be a timetable, a diagram, a set of rules, or a described experiment. The questions all draw on the same facts, which means the reading is done once and then reused several times. That changes how you should spend your time — a block is not five separate problems, it is one piece of comprehension followed by five short applications of it.

Work out the derived facts before you read a single question. Here the table gives departure and arrival times, but what the questions will actually want is the crossing length, so compute all four now: eighty-five minutes, seventy-five, a hundred and ten, and a hundred for the Raven, which crosses midnight. That last one is the awkward case and it is much better to meet it calmly now than under pressure at question four. Two minutes of preparation turns every question in the block into a lookup.

Here is why blocks deserve care. A single misreading of the stimulus feeds into every question below it, so one mistake can cost four marks rather than one — and every question is worth the same. Reading the Raven as arriving at ten past one on the same day rather than the next would wreck the whole block. The practical consequence is a warning sign worth learning: if two answers in the same block feel wrong, stop and re-read the stimulus rather than pushing on and hoping the next question is easier.

Blocks are usually ordered, getting harder down the page: a lookup, then a comparison, then a calculation using the comparison, then something with a condition attached. So keep your working — the later questions will ask for it again, and if you wrote the crossing times down before question one, question four is nearly free. One more thing worth knowing: if a block defeats you, the first question in it is almost always the easy one, so take that mark before you move on rather than abandoning the whole block.

The budgeting follows from all of this. At around seventy-five seconds a question, a five-question block is worth a bit over six minutes — and the right way to spend it is to give the first ninety seconds to the stimulus rather than to question one. That feels slow, and it is not: the remaining questions run fast because the hard part is already done. Both the quiz and the exercises below are blocks, so practise it that way. Read the table first, work out the crossing times, and only then start.