General Aptitude
General Aptitude is worth 15 marks in GATE EE (five 1-mark and five 2-mark questions) and is entirely scoring if the reading is disciplined. The paper draws on verbal aptitude, quantitative aptitude, analytical aptitude, and spatial aptitude; the spatial part (rotation, mirroring, paper folding, assembling) is the one candidates most often neglect.
Verbal aptitude
- Reading comprehension dominates. Answer strictly from the passage, never from general knowledge.
- Watch for negation and extreme quantifiers: questions with "except", "not", "only", or "all" turn on a single word.
- Narrative sequencing: the opening sentence usually introduces the subject without a dangling pronoun.
Quantitative and analytical
- Percentages, ratio–proportion, averages, mensuration, permutations, elementary probability, and data interpretation from tables, bar charts, pie charts, and line graphs.
- Series completion, coding–decoding, blood relations, syllogisms.
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 the profit is 5%. The reasoning matters: successive percentage changes multiply. Adding 40% and subtracting 25% would wrongly suggest 15%; the correct factor is 1.40 × 0.75 = 1.05.
Traps that cost marks
- Percentage points versus percent change - a rise from 20% to 25% is 5 percentage points but a 25% increase.
- Data interpretation: axis breaks, units in lakh or crore, and whether a chart shows totals or shares.
- Spatial rotation: track one marked corner rather than the whole figure, and remember that mirror images reverse handedness while rotations do not.