Test Partnership numerical reasoning: free-to-use practice
Test Partnership describes its numerical reasoning practice test as assessing how you interpret numerical information and perform basic calculations. It has 15 questions in 15 minutes. Here you can try a growth question of our own, then go on to untimed practice, free to use.
Reviewed
Testonome is independent. It is not affiliated with, endorsed by or sponsored by the organisations whose tests this page describes.
Test Partnership’s advice to candidates says that even the most complex psychometric tests use only maths most early school-leavers have: addition, subtraction, multiplication, division, percentages, ratios, and reading graphs, charts and tables. Almost everyone knows that maths, it says, and not everyone can answer within the time limit. Its advice is to practise percentages, ratios, multiplication and division.
The question below is a percentage question of our own. Its quick-looking route lands close to the right answer, so it checks whether you work out each year’s growth on the right amount. If you would rather go straight to untimed drills, they are in our numerical section.
Try a percentage growth question
Work out your answer before you open the working.
Practice question
A service has 800 active accounts. The number of accounts grows by 10% in each of the next two years.
How many active accounts does the service have after the second year's growth?
Our question, written for Testonome practice. Nothing you decide here is recorded.
Check your answer
968 accounts. Each year's 10% is worked out on the number of accounts at the start of that year. After the first year that number is no longer 800, so the second year's growth is bigger than the first.
- First year: 800 × 1.10 = 880 accounts, a growth of 80.
- Second year: 880 × 1.10 = 968 accounts, a growth of 88. It is 10% of 880, not of 800.
960 is what you get by adding the two years together as 20% and working that out on 800. It treats the second year as if it grew from 800 again. The second year grows from 880, so its 10% is 88 rather than 80, and the right total is 8 higher.
880 is the number after the first year. The question asks about the end of the second year, so one more step is needed.
168 is the number of accounts gained over the two years, 968 − 800. The question asks how many accounts there are at the end, not how many were added.
If you grew each year from the new amount and still reached a different figure, one multiplication slipped. Compare your two years with 880 and 968 to find it.
You can also check an answer without redoing it. When something grows at the same rate every year, working out each year on the new amount always gives more than adding the rates up, because from the second year the growth includes growth on earlier growth. So the answer has to be above 960, and 968 is.
The compound growth page works this same question step by step and names the other wrong routes.
Choose your next Test Partnership numerical practice
If you got 968 and could explain both years, move on to new figures in the drill below.
If you got 960, 880, 168 or another figure, or reached 968 by guessing, go back through the working above until you could redo it without looking. Then try the drill. Every question there is worked through after you submit, so a wrong answer shows you the step as well.
If the arithmetic is fine and what you have not seen is Test Partnership’s own format, use its candidate preparation page. Its practice tests are there to help you get familiar with the style of Test Partnership tests, and the numerical one has 15 questions in 15 minutes. Those figures are for that practice test. A test an employer invites you to take may have a different number of questions or a different time limit, and its own instructions tell you which. If you need extra time or another adjustment because of a disability, Test Partnership’s advice is to contact the employer.
The button below opens the compound growth drill: five multiple-choice questions, untimed and free to use, with no account and no payment. Each one gives a number of accounts, a yearly growth rate and a number of years, and asks how many accounts there are at the end. It practises the calculation rather than Test Partnership’s screens, and the target time in each explanation is our own pacing for this skill.