Spatial Reasoning
What is tested
Spatial reasoning measures your ability to hold and manipulate shapes in your mind: mental rotation, mirror images versus rotations, cube nets and folding, paper folding and hole punching, embedded figures, and counting blocks in 3D stacks.
Concepts to master
- A rotation keeps the object the same; a reflection reverses it. A left-handed shape can never be rotated into a right-handed one - check with a distinctive feature such as a single shaded corner.
- On a cube net, faces in a straight line of four are opposite in pairs (1st and 3rd, 2nd and 4th); the remaining two faces are opposite each other.
- When folding, follow one marked face and track which edge meets which.
- For hole punching, unfold one crease at a time and reflect the hole across each crease.
- When counting cubes, count the visible columns and add the hidden cubes needed to support them - stacks have no floating blocks.
Traps
- Choosing a mirror image when the question asks for a rotation, or the reverse.
- Folding a net towards you when the question folds it away, which reverses the result.
- Forgetting that stacked blocks need support, so undercounting.
- Assuming a shape is symmetrical when one corner is marked.
- Losing track of the observer's viewpoint.
Worked example
A net has four squares in a row labelled A, B, C, D plus two flaps. A is opposite C and B is opposite D; the two flaps become opposite faces. Any option that shows A adjacent to C is wrong immediately, no matter how plausible the rest of the drawing looks.
Rule of thumb: find one distinctive feature - a dot, a shaded corner, a letter - and track only that through the transformation. If its handedness changes, the figure has been reflected, not rotated.