Thinking Skills practice questions: what the NSW test actually asks

Thinking Skills is the section children have never seen before. It is not on the school curriculum, it is not taught in class, and a child who is strong at school maths and reading can still open this paper and not recognise what is being asked of them.

That is the problem worth solving, and it is mostly solved by exposure rather than study. Below are three real questions with full explanations. Work through them with your child and you will have covered most of what the section does.

Both the Opportunity Class test (Year 4) and the Selective High School test (Year 6) include Thinking Skills. The questions below are pitched at the range the two tests cover.

What the section is actually testing

Not knowledge. There is nothing to memorise and no formula sheet that helps.

It tests whether your child can find the assumption holding an argument up, notice when evidence does not support a conclusion, and work backwards from a result to the conditions that produce it. Those are habits, and habits respond to practice in a way that content revision does not.

The questions fall into two broad families: critical reasoning, where the material is an argument in words, and problem solving, where it is a puzzle with numbers or constraints.

Question 1 — finding the assumption

The council says the community garden should be closed because its maintenance costs are too high. Since the garden is the only green space where neighbourhood children can play, closing it will significantly reduce the amount of outdoor activity they get.

Which of the following, if true, most weakens the argument?

A. A public park is located a five-minute walk from the neighbourhood. B. The garden provides fresh vegetables to the local senior centre. C. The council plans to increase funding for school sports programmes next year. D. The garden’s annual maintenance cost has risen by only two percent this year.

The answer is A.

The argument rests on one unstated assumption: that the garden is the only green space available. A shows another park five minutes away, so closing the garden need not reduce outdoor activity at all. The assumption collapses, and the conclusion goes with it.

Why the others fail is the more useful lesson:

• B describes a different benefit of the garden. Real, but it has nothing to do with children’s outdoor activity.
• C describes a different programme entirely. Sports funding is not the green space the argument is about.
• D attacks the cost claim, not the reasoning. It is the option children pick most often, because it feels like disagreeing with the council.

The habit to build: find the sentence the whole argument would fall without, then ask what would have to be true for it to hold. That is the assumption, and weakening it is almost always the answer.

Question 2 — when evidence does not support the conclusion

Emma, the manager of a local bike shop, wants to know whether customers are happy with the new safety helmets. She asks the 80 customers who bought the new helmet last month to rate their satisfaction on a scale of 1 to 10. The average rating is 9.2, so she concludes that the new helmet makes all customers very satisfied.

What is the main weakness in Emma’s survey?

A. The survey only includes customers who purchased the helmet. B. The rating scale of 1 to 10 may be interpreted inconsistently. C. The sample size is too small to represent all shop customers. D. Customers might have felt pressured to give high scores because Emma was present.

The answer is A.

Emma asked only people who already chose to buy the helmet. People who looked at it and did not buy it are exactly the ones most likely to be unsatisfied, and none of them were asked. The result cannot be generalised to all customers, however high the average is.

The others are all plausible-sounding and all wrong here:

• C is the trap. Eighty responses is a reasonable sample. Children are taught “small samples are unreliable” and reach for it before checking whether eighty is actually small.
• B describes a real survey problem that does not apply. A 1-to-10 scale is a standard, clear measure.
• D invents a fact. Nothing in the passage says Emma was present when people answered.

The habit to build: check who was asked before checking how many. A biased sample cannot be fixed by making it bigger.

Question 3 — working backwards from constraints

A school fundraiser sells two types of tickets. A standard ticket costs $2 and gives 1 raffle entry. A premium ticket costs $5 and gives 4 raffle entries. The school wants to raise exactly $27 and give out exactly 15 raffle entries. How many of each ticket must be sold?

A. 11 standard tickets and 1 premium ticket B. 6 standard tickets and 3 premium tickets C. 7 standard tickets and 2 premium tickets D. 9 standard tickets and 2 premium tickets

The answer is A.

Two conditions have to hold at once, so write both down:

Cost:     2s + 5p = 27
Entries:   s + 4p = 15

Rearrange the entries line to s = 15 − 4p, then substitute into the cost line:

2(15 − 4p) + 5p = 27
30 − 8p + 5p     = 27
30 − 3p          = 27
3p               = 3
p = 1,  so  s = 15 − 4 = 11

Eleven standard and one premium. Check both conditions: $22 + $5 = $27, and 11 + 4 = 15 entries. Both hold.

The habit to build: in the test, substitution is often slower than simply testing the four options against both conditions. Option A costs $27 and gives 15 entries; the others fail one or the other. Your child does not need the elegant method. They need the right answer inside the time.

What actually helps between now and May

Three things, in order of how much they matter:

1. Exposure, early. The single biggest gain is your child not being surprised. A dozen questions spread over months beats fifty in the last fortnight.
2. Talking through wrong answers. The value is in why B was tempting, not in the letter that was right. A child who can explain why they fell for D has learnt something a correct guess teaches nobody.
3. Reading arguments, not just stories. Opinion columns, letters to the editor, anything where someone is trying to convince you. Ask what the writer is assuming.

What does not help: drilling arithmetic, memorising question types, or timed papers before the habits exist. Speed comes last, not first.

Where these questions came from

All three are real questions from the free question library that ships inside the Cognora app. No account, no email address and no payment is required to work through the rest of them, and the free sample questions page has more alongside a printable study planner.

If you want regular practice beyond these, Cognora covers Thinking Skills alongside Reading and Mathematical Reasoning, and it is free to start. It does not mark Writing.

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Test structure on this page was checked against NSW Department of Education published information on 11 September 2026. The department may change the test format — always confirm current details on education.nsw.gov.au before acting on them.