General Aptitude: scoring patterns in verbal, quantitative, analytical and spatial reasoning
General Aptitude contributes 15 of the 100 marks on the GATE Aerospace Engineering paper: ten questions, five of 1 mark and five of 2 marks, carrying the same 1/3 and 2/3 negative marking as the technical sections (numerical-answer and multiple-select items carry none).
What is actually tested
- Verbal ability: grammar and usage, vocabulary in context, sentence completion, and one or two reading-comprehension passages.
- Quantitative aptitude: ratios, percentages, profit and loss, averages, mixtures, time–speed–distance, mensuration, counting, and data interpretation from tables or charts.
- Analytical aptitude: number and letter series, blood relations, seating arrangement, syllogisms, coding–decoding, direction sense.
- Spatial aptitude: paper folding, mirror and water images, figure counting, rotation of three-dimensional objects.
Worked example
A trader marks an item 40% above cost and then allows a 25% discount. Take cost = 100. Marked price = 140. Selling price = 140 × 0.75 = 105, so profit = 5 on 100, i.e. 5%. The point of the example is the base: markup is applied to cost, discount to the marked price, so successive percentages never add (40 − 25 ≠ 15).
Traps that cost marks
- Applying a percentage change to the wrong base, especially in chained discount problems.
- Comprehension questions that ask for an inference rather than a stated fact, or that contain "EXCEPT"/"NOT" - the correct option is the odd one out, not the true statement.
- Data interpretation: reading the axis scale, units and whether a bar represents a total or a category.
- Over-investing time in a single 1-mark item; each question is scored individually, so no item is worth three minutes.