Selective entry relationships questions

Amounts are tied together, and your child follows the tie to find the one that's missing. ACER says Quantitative Reasoning tests thinking and reasoning with numbers, patterns and shapes, in abstract and real-world settings. Here the settings are everyday ones: cups and jugs, flowers in a garden bed, bags on a plank.

The sums are short; the work is in seeing how the amounts are linked. These three are our own, from easier to harder, each with the answer and the working shown. Ask your child to say the link in a sentence, then check each swap or group against the question together.

Put the link into words, then change one step at a time. Small steps keep every number easy to handle by hand, which matters with no calculator allowed. Quantitative Reasoning shares 60 minutes with Mathematics, and short, safe steps also mean fewer answers to redo.

This is our method, not ACER's.

Here the method can be right and the answer still wrong, because the last step answers a different question. For each wrong option, find it below, name the slip together, then reread the last line.

• Answering for one, not for all. In the first question, 12 cups fill one bucket. The question asks about 2 buckets, so the answer is 24.
• Adding when the link means multiply. Also in the first question, adding the 4 and 3 instead of multiplying, then doubling, gives 14.
• Giving only part of the total. In the second, 60 is the number of daisies. The question asks for all the flowers, which is 96.
• Forgetting what is already on the plank. In the third, leaving out the 4 kg bag gives 80 cm, and leaving out the 3 kg bag gives 20 cm. Counting every bag gives 60 cm.

Relationships turn up all over the house, so there's no need for worksheets. ACER says these skills grow over time, through a culture of learning, varied engaging material and talking freely about ideas, so short, regular talk helps more than a cram.

• In the kitchen, ask how many small cups fill a jug, then how many would fill a saucepan.
• When you scale a recipe up or down, let your child work out every amount.
• On a seesaw, try who must sit where to balance, then talk about why.

There are more worked questions on our quantitative reasoning sample questions page. Three questions show the steps; a full sitting shows whether your child keeps them up with Mathematics on the same clock. Our selective entry practice tests run to the real timing, Practice test 1 is free, and the results by skill show whether these questions cost marks.