Chapter-wise Aptitude Tests
Build your own timed test from 700 original quantitative aptitude questions across 14 arithmetic topics. Choose a topic, how many questions and how long you want, then work through it with a question palette, mark-for-review and a full worked solution on every question. No negative marking. 100% free, no sign-up.
Tip: Since there is no negative marking, never leave a question blank. When a topic is solid, move on to the 50-question full-length test, which mixes all fourteen topics the way a real paper does.
Fourteen topics, fifty questions each
The bank behind this builder is the same set of questions printed in the two MasterMan Quantitative Aptitude practice sets, and it is organised the way arithmetic is actually taught rather than the way a syllabus document lists it. Each topic holds fifty questions, which is enough to attempt a topic three or four times without meeting the same question twice.
- Number System — unit digits of large powers, divisibility and least-addition problems, HCF and LCM, counting factors, remainders.
- Average — replacement of a member, wrong readings corrected, weighted averages, consecutive numbers, batting averages.
- Percentage — successive changes, restoring an original value, pass marks and failure margins, population and depreciation.
- Profit and Loss — marked price and discount, the equal gain-and-loss trap, cost price from two selling prices, dishonest weights.
- Ratio and Proportion — dividing a sum, changed ratios, mixtures of two ratios, proportional shares.
- Partnership — simple and compound partnerships, working and sleeping partners, capital withdrawn part-way through the year.
- Time and Work — combined rates, efficiency comparisons, people joining or leaving mid-task, wages split by work done.
- Pipes and Cisterns — inlets and outlets together, a leak discovered late, filling a tank in parts.
- Time and Distance — relative speed, trains crossing platforms and each other, boats in streams, average speed over equal distances.
- Simple Interest — rate and time from an amount, sums split across two rates, doubling and tripling periods.
- Compound Interest — annual and half-yearly compounding, the gap between compound and simple interest over two years, instalments.
- Problems on Ages — past and future ratios, sums and differences, ages of a group changing when a member joins.
- Alligation or Mixture — the alligation rule, repeated replacement from a vessel, mixing two mixtures.
- Area — rectangles and squares from a diagonal, triangles by Heron's rule, circles, paths around a plot, carpeting costs.
Every question carries a worked solution written the way you should write it in the exam hall: the shortest reliable route rather than the most elegant one. Where a standard shortcut exists — the x²/100 rule for an equal percentage gain and loss, 2ab/(a + b) for average speed over equal distances, P(R/100)² for the two-year gap between compound and simple interest — the solution names it, so you can recognise the pattern next time instead of rebuilding it from scratch.
The wrong options are worth a moment of your attention too. They are not random numbers. Each one is built from a specific mistake students make on that question type: taking the percentage of the wrong base, forgetting the length of the platform, averaging two speeds arithmetically, applying a discount to the cost price instead of the marked price. If you get a question wrong, the option you picked usually tells you exactly which step you slipped on, which is far more useful than simply knowing you were wrong.
How to work through a topic
Aptitude is unusual among the things engineering students prepare for, because almost none of the difficulty is conceptual. There is nothing in this bank harder than Class 10 arithmetic. What makes an aptitude section hard is that you get roughly sixty to ninety seconds per question and the numbers are deliberately awkward — 17.5% of 1,840 rather than 10% of 200. The skill being tested is whether you can set up the calculation instantly and then carry it out without a calculator.
That has a direct consequence for how you should practise. Reading a chapter on percentages and following the worked examples will not make you faster, because recognition is not recall. You have to retrieve the method under time pressure, repeatedly, until the setup stops requiring thought. That is what a timed topic test is for.
A workable cycle for one topic
- First pass, accuracy only. Take ten questions with the duration set generously. Do not rush. The goal is to find out which question types you cannot set up at all, and those are the ones that need reading rather than drilling.
- Read every solution, including for the questions you got right. A surprising number of correct answers on a four-option paper are lucky eliminations. If your reasoning was not the reasoning in the solution, you have survived one instance of the question type rather than learned it.
- Second pass, with the clock tight. Take twenty questions at one minute each. Accuracy will fall. That is expected and it recovers; the point is to train the setup, not to protect a score nobody is recording.
- Sort your errors before you revise anything. See the four buckets below. Most wrong answers do not call for more theory, and treating them all as gaps in knowledge is the commonest way to spend weeks on aptitude and see no movement.
- Leave a gap, then retake. Two or three days. An immediate retake measures short-term memory and tells you almost nothing. Because the builder samples a fresh set each time, a retake is genuinely new questions from the same topic.
- Stop when a delayed retake clears eighty per cent, and move that topic into mixed practice with the full-length test.
The four kinds of mistake
When you review a test, every wrong answer falls into exactly one of these, and they need completely different responses:
- You did not know the method. The only bucket that calls for going back and learning something — and for most students the smallest one, which usually surprises them.
- You knew the method and slipped on the arithmetic. The fix is more sums, not more theory. Slips fall away with volume and with writing one more intermediate line than feels necessary.
- You misread the question. Almost always a single word: “not”, “except”, “at least”, or a unit changing from metres to kilometres between the stem and the options. The fix is a deliberate habit of rereading the final sentence before you choose.
- You ran out of time. The fix is a skip rule, not faster arithmetic. Decide in advance how long a question gets — ninety seconds is a sensible default — and abandon it when the time is up. The five minutes spent rescuing one stubborn problem are taken from four you could have answered comfortably.
Why topic-by-topic practice is only the first half
Working one topic at a time is called blocked practice, and it is the right way to build a method. You apply the same approach repeatedly until it becomes automatic.
But it has a hidden limit. When every question in front of you is a percentage question, you never have to work out which method applies, because you already know. In a real paper, identifying the right approach is a substantial part of the difficulty, and blocked practice gives you no chance to rehearse it. This is exactly why students who score well on topic tests sometimes come apart on a full paper made of the same material.
So treat these tests as the first half of the work. Once a topic is solid, move to the full-length test, where all fourteen topics are interleaved and choosing the approach is part of the question. Mixed practice feels harder and produces lower scores in the moment, which is precisely why it works.