General Knowledge and Reasoning
General Knowledge and Reasoning in the FMRDA Medicine Admission exam combines current affairs, basic science in the news, geography, history, and logical reasoning. The reasoning items test structure rather than specialist knowledge: syllogisms, number and letter series, analogies, and data interpretation.
Current affairs and science awareness
Know major public-health bodies and their roles, common disease outbreaks and transmission routes, and headline scientific developments. Link facts to context: a vaccine works by priming adaptive immunity; antibiotics target bacteria, not viruses. For geography, know capital cities, major rivers, and climate zones; for history, focus on dates and consequences of major events rather than isolated names.
Logical reasoning
In syllogisms, accept only what the premises force. “All A are B” does not imply “all B are A”. “Some A are B” does not imply “some B are not A”. For number series, check differences, ratios, alternating patterns, and squares or primes. For analogies, state the relationship in a sentence before choosing an option.
Data interpretation
Read axes, units, and legends before calculating. Percentage change = (new − old)/old × 100. Distinguish percentage points from percent: a rise from 20% to 25% is 5 percentage points but a 25% relative increase.
Worked example
Premises: All doctors are graduates. Some graduates are researchers. Does “Some doctors are researchers” follow? No. The graduates who are doctors may all lie outside the researcher subset. The premises guarantee only that doctors are within the graduate set and that at least one graduate is a researcher; they do not force an overlap between doctors and researchers.
Traps that cost marks
- Converting “all A are B” into “all B are A”.
- Treating “some” as “some but not all”.
- Confusing percentage points with percent change.
- Choosing a series rule that fits only the first two terms and ignores later terms.
- Relying on outside facts when a reasoning item is self-contained.