NTS NAT common mistakes
NTS NAT · Understand the traps and how to avoid them.
Choosing the preposition, idiom, or verb-form option that 'sounds right' in casual spoken English instead of testing it against formal written usage (e.g., picking 'discuss about', 'married with', 'comprises of').
Candidates have heard these collocations thousands of times in conversation and local media, so familiarity is mistaken for correctness; the ear is trained on spoken variety, not on the written standard the paper tests.
What to do instead
Maintain a one-page list of high-frequency exam collocations (discuss, comprise, married to, prefer X to Y, insist on, consist of, regard as) and before answering, say the full sentence silently with the option inserted; if the pattern is not on your list and not clearly idiomatic, prefer the simpler construction with no added preposition.
Reading the comprehension passage start to finish first, then answering questions from memory, and skimming past limiting words such as NOT, EXCEPT, TRUE, FALSE, and LEAST in the question stem.
School habit is 'read the text, then answer', which burns 2-3 minutes per passage and leaves working memory overloaded; under time pressure the eye registers the topic word and skips the one negative word that reverses the correct answer.
What to do instead
Read the question stems first, then scan the passage only for the relevant lines. Circle or underline every negative or absolute word in the stem before looking at the options, and reject any option that answers the passage rather than the stem.
Treating analogy items as free association, picking a pair that is merely 'related' (or thematically close to the stem words) rather than naming a precise relationship such as cause-effect, part-whole, degree, or worker-tool.
Analogy items feel like vocabulary quizzes, so candidates search for any connection instead of specifying one; this makes several options look defensible and the choice becomes guesswork.
What to do instead
Before reading the options, write a short sentence linking the stem pair ('a scalpel is the tool a surgeon uses'). Then test each option by substituting its words into that same sentence and reject anything that changes the relationship, the order, or the direction.
Guessing a word's meaning from a familiar root or a remembered dictionary sense and ignoring the charge (positive/negative) of the surrounding sentence, so a synonym for the wrong sense is selected.
Most exam words are polysemous and most stems contain a contrast or cause signal (although, because, despite) that fixes which sense is wanted; candidates who skip the signal lose the polarity cue and pick the most common meaning instead.
What to do instead
Locate the context clue word and label it + or - before touching the options. Then eliminate every option whose connotation does not match the label, and only after that compare the survivors on precise meaning.
Solving quantitative items by full long-hand computation in the conventional order instead of checking whether the answer choices allow back-substitution, approximation, or unit-digit elimination.
The habit comes from school maths, where showing a method is the goal; in a timed aptitude paper the goal is the answer, and full computation costs three to four times as much time as estimation or plugging in options.
What to do instead
Look at the options before computing. If they are widely spaced, round the inputs and estimate; if they are numerical and messy, plug the middle option in and move up or down; if a question involves divisibility or last digits, check the unit digit only. Reserve exact computation for items where every shortcut legitimately fails.
Applying percentage change to whichever number appears last in the sentence rather than to the stated base, and adding successive percentage changes arithmetically (treating a 20% rise then a 20% fall as no change).
Percentages are read as absolute quantities in everyday life, and the phrase order in the question easily overrides the grammatical 'of' clause; successive changes compound multiplicatively, a rule that is rarely practised orally.
What to do instead
Write the base amount explicitly at the start of every percentage item ('base = original price') and convert each change into a multiplier (1.2, 0.8). Multiply the multipliers for chains, and sanity-check the result against the direction of the last change.
Leaving questions blank in the final minutes - especially geometry, ratio, and data-interpretation items - because they were flagged as hard and never revisited.
Candidates carry over the assumption that guessing is penalised, or simply run out of time on an earlier section, so unattempted items are abandoned rather than filled with an educated elimination.
What to do instead
Adopt a three-pass strategy (easy items, then medium, then long items) with a hard per-question time cap, and reserve the last two minutes to fill every remaining blank by eliminating the options that are clearly wrong and choosing among the rest.
Attempting seating-arrangement, scheduling, and grouping puzzles by trying to build the complete arrangement mentally, then re-reading the whole prompt from the start after each clue.
The clues are designed so that most of them constrain very little and one or two constrain heavily; starting at clue one with no written scratch work forces repeated re-reading and creates contradictions that are attributed to the puzzle rather than to the method.
What to do instead
Draw the fixed slots or a table before reading the clues, then apply the most restrictive clue first (a fixed position, an immediate neighbour, or a negative 'A is not next to B'). Record each clue as a symbol on the diagram, and never erase a possibility - cross it out so earlier deductions stay visible.
Answering syllogism and deduction items using real-world knowledge or reversing the statement (reading 'all A are B' as 'all B are A', or 'some A are B' as 'all A are B'), instead of treating the given statements as the only truth.
The given statements are often factually false or counter-intuitive, and the habit of checking them against reality overrides the formal logic; the converse error is a natural pattern of everyday inference that is rarely tested in school.
What to do instead
Draw a minimal Venn diagram with the subject circle inside the predicate circle, then check the proposed conclusion against the diagram only. For every conclusion of the form 'all/some B are A', stop and verify whether that conversion is licensed by the diagram before accepting it, and ignore facts about the real world entirely.
Preparing the subject section from university-level textbooks, notes borrowed from a different stream, or the internet broadly, instead of working through the official topic list and question style for the specific NAT stream being attempted.
The subject section is set at intermediate (FSc/ICS/Commerce/Arts) level, so over-preparing creates wasted weeks and sometimes wrong answers where a higher-level convention contradicts the level expected; candidates also misjudge which chapters carry weight.
What to do instead
Download the official syllabus and weightage for your exact NAT stream, build a checklist of the listed topics only, and after each chapter do timed practice of the same item style and difficulty as the sample paper. Mark any topic outside the list as out of scope and stop revising it.