Spatial Reasoning
Spatial Reasoning tests mental rotation, folding, reflection, and map or diagram reading. You must hold a shape or layout in mind and decide what changes when it is turned, folded, or measured at scale.
Mental rotation
- Track one distinctive feature, such as a notch, dot, or shaded corner, through the rotation.
- Rotation preserves shape and handedness; reflection reverses handedness.
- A 90-degree clockwise turn moves top to right, right to bottom, bottom to left, and left to top.
Folding and nets
- On a cube net, faces separated by one square in a straight line end up opposite each other.
- Opposite faces can never be adjacent in the folded cube.
- Three faces that meet at a corner must appear around that corner in the net.
- Check whether a pattern would be hidden inside the fold.
Maps and diagrams
- Use the scale bar or representative fraction: 1:50,000 means 1 cm represents 50,000 cm, or 0.5 km.
- Bearings are measured clockwise from north.
- Distinguish straight-line distance from distance along a road or path.
- Read grid references eastings before northings.
Worked example
A map has a scale of 1:50,000. Two checkpoints are 4 cm apart on the map. What is the real straight-line distance? 4 cm x 50,000 = 200,000 cm. Divide by 100,000 to convert to kilometres: 2 km. The distance is 2 km.
Traps
- Confusing a mirror image with a rotation.
- Placing two opposite net faces next to each other.
- Using the wrong scale unit or forgetting the centimetre-to-kilometre conversion.
- Reading a grid reference in the wrong order.