Sample questions
Try your hand at the following questions.- If apples are on sale at 15 for $3, what’s the cost of each apple?
- A. 50 cents
- B. 25 cents
- C. 20 cents
- D. 30 cents
- A noncommissioned officer challenged her platoon of 11 enlisted women to beat her record of performing a 26-mile training run in 4 hours. If all the enlisted women match her record, how many miles will they have run?
- A. 71.5 miles
- B. 6.5 miles
- C. 286 miles
- D. 312 miles
- Diane gets her hair cut and colored at an expensive salon in town. She’s expected to leave a 15% tip for services. If a haircut is $45 and a color treatment is $150, how much of a tip should Diane leave?
- A. $22.50
- B. $29.25
- C. $20.00
- D. $224.25
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A bag of sand holds 1 cubic foot of sand. How many bags of sand are needed to fill a square sandbox measuring 5 feet long and 1 foot high?
- A. 25 bags
- B. 5 bags
- C. 10 bags
- D. 15 bags
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The day Samantha arrived at boot camp, the temperature reached a high of 90 degrees in the shade and a low of –20 degrees at night in the barracks. What was the average temperature for the day?
- A. 35 degrees
- B. 45 degrees
- C. 55 degrees
- D. 62 degrees
Answers and explanations
Use this answer key to score the Arithmetic Reasoning practice questions.- C. Divide $3 by 15. The answer is $0.20, so the correct answer is Choice (C).
- C. Multiply 26 × 11. The other information in the question is irrelevant — it’s there to throw you off. The correct answer is Choice (C). You can immediately eliminate Choice (B) because it isn’t a reasonable answer. Identifying unreasonable answers (through the process of elimination) can help you choose the correct answer choice faster.
- B. Add 45 and 150 to get the cost of the services ($45 + $150 = $195); then multiply the answer by 0.15 (15%) to find the tip. The question asks for the amount of the tip, so the correct answer is Choice (B), $29.25. You can immediately eliminate Choice (D), because the amount is far too high to make sense.
- A. To find the volume of the sandbox, you take length times width times height (V=lwh). Don’t forget that the measurements are for a square sandbox, so you can assume that if the box is 5 feet long, then it’s also 5 feet wide. So 5 × 5 ×1 is 25 cubic feet. Each bag holds 1 cubic foot of sand, and 25 ÷ 1 = 25. Choice (A) is the correct answer. If you were thinking answer Choice (B) sounded good, remember that the answer should make sense. Five cubic feet of sand would not fill a very large sandbox, would it?
- A. Add the two temperatures: 90 + (–20) = 70). Divide 70 by 2 to reach the average temperature, 35. Choice (A) is the correct answer.