The revised & updated 2012 AD and AST editions are available from 24 Oct 2011!
Corrigenda of the 2012 AD edition
No error has been reported until now.
Corrigenda of the 2012 AST edition
- Question 53 of the Accuracy test’s answer list should show D and not E
Corrigenda of the 2011 AD edition
We apologise for the errors. We will make sure to significantly improve our quality control for future editions.
- Page 51: answer D is missing from the sample table, though visible a few pages afterwards. It reads “D. Skopje’s concrete blocks represent the legacy of rebuilding after the destruction of World War II.”
- Page 55: in the section “Correct versus Incorrect Statement” in the first sentence it should read “Administrator” (not Assistant)
- Page 58: under the heading “Frequency” the word “meanwhile” appears twice
- Page 100 and 103: questions 93 and 101 are identical
- Page 148: the second bullet in the Mental calculus section is the repetition of the first
- Page 163: question 13 answer D should be “27.62%”, therefore the same amount should be in the explanation on page 192
- Page 168: one line from the table on question 33-35 is missing, and it should contain two data for Ukraine such as 46936 in the 1st column (population) and 8401 in the 2nd column (no. of students)
- Page 169: question 35 answer B should be “48 euro”
- Page 169: question 36 should read as follows: “If 21.4% of the Danish population is
under the minimum age to marry, what percentage of the eligible population (i.e. over the minimum age and unmarried) got married in 2005, if Danes only married other Danes?”. Also, answer D should read: “12,2%”
- Page 171: question 44, answer B should be “Up 278,000″ instead of “Up 285,000″; see comment for explanation on page 195
- Page 176: the 1st column of the table on top of the page should have “thousands” instead of millions
- Page 176: the table for questions 75 and 76 should read “2005″ as the “student population in 2005″ instead of “2007″. Also, question 75 should read: “How many females were in tertiary education in Luxembourg in 2005?”
- Page 178: answer A for question 89 should be “6.6 million”
- Page 183: the 3rd column caption in the table for questions 115-117 should simply read “3″ instead of “3+”. Figures in the last two columns for these questions are adjusted as shown below:
Question 116 rewritten to reflect the above changes, as follows:
“How many people in the UK own 4 phones or more?
A. 320784 B. 602610 C. 1172340 D. 507320 E. 52000
- Page 183: question 117, answer E should be “3.86 million”
- Page 184: the bar chart for the Netherlands for questions 121-123 should have the figures “224″ for 2004 and “254″ for 2006 and “273″ for 2005
- Page 186: answer A in question 128 should be 348 instead of 258, and the question should be rephrased as follows: “How many fewer heart attacks would Serbia have needed to record to have exactly one third of all recorded heart attacks in the countries listed in the table?”
- Page 190: question 149 should read “If the number of families in Poland decreases by 15000 each year, …”
- Page 191: question 2 explanation should have a superscript, so instead of “5481*1.0025″ it should read “5481*1.0025“; similarly for question 5 explanation, instead of “41.87*1.0022″ it should be “41.87*1.0022”
- Page 192: question 16, “The amount of Switzerland’s gold reserves changed from (…) to 1054 tonnes”, this should read “1040 tonnes”
- Page 193: question 19 – last line should read “100 * (59/3111 x 1.0032)”
- Page 194: answer 35 explanation should read “take the total of secondary students in each country (35.2% of all students) and multiply by the spending per student, then divide by the total population to get how much the per capita spend is. The answer is therefore (((56*0.352)*6062)/
- Page 194: answer 36 should read: “In Denmark there were 22481 marriages in 2005. Multiply by 2 to get the number of people that married (44962). The number eligible for marriage is 28.2% (unmarried) less 21.4% (under the age) of the
population (6.8% of 5417000) which is 368356. The percentage who married is (44962/368356)*100 = 12.2%”
- Page 194: question 37 explanation is missing a “-” sign between “((47124/9978)-(48391/10078))”
- Page 194: question 40 explanation is missing a “-” sign between “((542/43060)-(537/(43060/0.998)))”
- Page 195: question 44 explanation should read “In 2005 there was 1 policeman for every 138.97 of population (58645/422 = 138.97). In 2010 there were 424 thousand policemen so the population was 138.97*424000 = 58.923.000. The increase in the population was therefore 58.923.000-58.645.000 = 278.000″
- Page 197: question 67 explanation should read “61899″ instead of “60098″ for the UK instead of the figure for Italy, but the answer and the rest of the explanation remain valid
- Page 199: question 89 explanation should read “Cable broadband users increased by 121.4% (2987-1349=1638 => 1638/1349*100=121.4). In 2015 there will therefore be 2987+2987*121.4% = 6613 (thousands)”
- Page 199: for question 95 the correct answer is B
- Page 199: question 97 explanation should not have a “/” but a “-” sign in between “((6842/(7441+30))-(6939/(7441-30))”
- Page 201: answer 116 should read “99% of the population own 0-3 phones (17.2+79.6+2.0+0.2). 1% of the population of
60,261,000 is 602,610″
- Page 201: answer 117 figure should read “58645″ instead of “58545″
- Page 202: answer 127, second line should read “one year” instead of “one week”
- Page 202: answer 128 should be replaced with the following: “Let the number we are looking for be X, then: X = (4748+5014+8128+6042+X) / 3 which is 3X = 4748 + 5014 + 8128 + 6042 + X which is 2X = 4748 + 5014 + 8128 + 6042 therefore X = 11966 This is (12314 – 11966) = 348 fewer heart attacks than the real number in 2005.”
- Page 204: answer 149 is missing a number “4″ from 572 which should read 5724 in the first part of the equation
- Page 221: question 18, in answer B the liquid (and therefore the bubbles) should be “invisible”
- Page 222: question 20, in the 2nd image, the bottom right circle should be unshaded – the question/answer/explanations remain fully valid nevertheless
- Page 225: question 29, in the correct answer (E), the petal in the bottom left should be flipped back to its original position, that is, its tip should be pointing inwards
- Page 225: question 30 – in the 3rd and 4th image, the middle triangle should be rotated by 90º so that its right angle points diagonally away from the small circle. This nevertheless does not change the outcome of the exercise and the answer remains valid.
- Page 238: question 70 – in answer E the circles in the eggs should be four, one, two and three respectively and the four circles in the first egg should be shaded
- Page 247 and 259: question 96 – the correct answer is A instead of B
- Page 250: question 13, the correct answer is B: the plant first moves 4 steps to the “right” so it ends up in the middle column, then moves 5 steps, then 6, then 7 and the last one will be moving 8 steps which is answer B
- Page 250: question 18, rule 1 is not respected in the answer A since the flask should turn 45 degrees clockwise instead of 45 degrees counter-clockwise. The correct answer is therefore B with the above correction (the liquid and therefore the bubbles should be “invisible”)
Corrigenda of the 2011 AST edition
- Page 42, 9 lines from the end of the page, at the frequency indicators the word “meanwhile” is mentioned twice in the same line
Corrigenda of the 2010 edition
- Page 26: the rule according to which scores must be reached in each of the admission tests, may have exceptions as is the case in the linguist exams where abstract and numerical reasoning scores are combined and counted as one single item
- Page 73: question 46, answer B should not include “and climate change”
- Page 73: question 47, answer D should not include “only”
- Page 74: question 50, answer B can be more precise if read as “Many European politicians see the European Union…”
- Page 88: question 83, answer B should read 5 million instead of 50 million
- Page 92: question 92, answer B should be Cannot tell
- Page 93: question 94, answer C is cannot tell; answer E should read was instead of is
- Page 94: question 96, the spelling of Yulia Tymoshenko should read the same in all answers
- Page 104: the rule of having X-Y digits does not hold, text has been redrafted (please see at the bottom of this section the new text)
- Page 109: the number 66 in the outer curve of the pie chart should be 76; looking at the diagram is a valid way only if totals on each segment are in absolute terms the same or the segments are in percentages with each of the rings representing 100%
- Page 117: question 24 can be more precise by adding “if the unemployment rate is 2% of the total population in …
- Page 127: question 80, answer D should read 3.7 and all other answer should have a decimal after their first digit (2.42, 2.51 etc.)
- Page 130: the upper table has no caption, it should read Tax revenues in various OECD countries (percentage of GDP)
- Page 146: another interpretation of the sample odd-one-out could be that answer F is only convex form whereas all others are concave – note that no such odd-one-out question will be used for the real EPSO exam, these are only for practice purposes to improve your methodology skills
- Page 152: same idea of convex-conclave can be used for the bottom left figure
- Page 158: question 12, dolphin A should have only black belly not black and white, this is a printing/drawing mistake
- Page 163: question 32, answer A may also be considered as the odd one out given the lack of any triangle in the middle
- Page 169: question 55, there are other alternative answers such as B (all but one figure have at least two horizontal lines) or F (all but one figure have at least two parallel lines)
- Page 170: question 59, figure C may also be considered as the odd one out for being the only one that does not contain any angles
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Page 103-104 new text:
Order of Magnitude
An order of magnitude is a scale of amounts where each amount is in a fixed ratio to the amount preceding it. The most common ratio is 1:10, which means that the next amount in a scale can be calculated by multiplying the previous figure by 10.
For example:
1 — 10 — 100 — 1000 — 10000 …and so on…
If we look at the above answer options, we will realize that that is exactly the situation we have here: the only difference is that the smallest number is rounded and the order is reverse:
543,500 — 54,350 — 5,435 — 543.5 (rounded to 544) …and so on…
When we are faced with a set of numbers like the ones above, it will give us an important hint that the actual calculation of the figure is not really necessary – all we need to figure out is the order of magnitude of the correct answer.
Let us consider again the above question from the perspective of whether we can take advantage of this observation. We pick up from the point where we converted the GDP figure to thousands: 375,000,000
The next thing we did was to calculate the value of the oil revenue: 375,000,000 * 0.4 = 150,000,000
The next step would be to calculate the per-capita oil revenue figure: 150,000,000 / 27601
This can be simplified to: 150,000,000 / 28,000
We then reduce these figures by eliminating as many as possible of an equal number of zeroes on each side of the calculation, which leaves us with 150,000 / 28
We now put aside the three zeroes in 150,000, which leaves us with 150 (but remember that we will need to bring the zeroes back later). This process, called reducing numbers to significant digits, leaves us with 150 / 28 (or roughly: 150 / 30 = 15 / 3 =5).
We now have to bring back the three zeroes set aside, which turns 5 into 5,000, a four-digit number. This in turn tells us that the correct answer has to be a four digit number, i.e. greater than 1,000 less than 10,000, which in this case is 5,434.58.
Let us summarize this short cut:
• When doing calculations involving large numbers with lots of zeroes, we need only concentrate on significant digits (digits other than zero).
• When looking at the order of magnitude, we need only define the range within which the result will fall, i.e. the number of digits as in ‘greater than 1 less than 10 (one digit figure) or greater than 10 less than 100 (2 digit figure) or greater than 100 less than 1,000 (3 digit figure) and so on
• Always be mindful of the zeroes you set aside and remember to add them back at the end.
• If the large figures given contain no zeroes (eg. 365,174,234.44), then round the figure up or down to the nearest easily managable figure (e.g. 365,000,000).
Remember, in order of magnitude questions, it is not the resulting figure but merely the number of digits in the resulting figure you need to establish to get the right answer.