Analytical Reasoning Questions with Solutions

Analytical reasoning questions give a set of conditions about people, objects or events and ask you to deduce facts from them. They include puzzles on scheduling (who does what on which day), distribution (who owns which item), floor-based puzzles, comparisons, and grouping or selection problems where certain people must or cannot be chosen together. The key is organising the information. Draw a table or grid with the categories as rows and columns, and fill in the definite clues first. Then use the conditional clues to eliminate possibilities, marking crosses for what is impossible and ticks for what is certain. When a clue leaves two possibilities, write both cases and test each against the remaining clues. Usually one case leads to a contradiction. Most puzzles have four or five questions, so time spent setting up a clear grid pays off. Practise the analytical reasoning puzzles below. Each solution shows the grid built step by step.