Deductive Reasoning Test with Answers

A deductive reasoning test gives you a set of rules or facts and asks what must follow from them, with no guessing and no outside knowledge. In graduate hiring it appears as syllogisms ("All A are B; some B are C…"), as "Which statement must be true / cannot be true?" items with four or five premises, and, in SHL's newer interactive tests, as scheduling, ranking and calendar puzzles you solve by dragging. SHL's General Ability test devotes about a third of its items to deduction. This guide shows the formats as they appeared in 2026 tests, the logic you need, and original practice questions with answers.

Key facts

What deductive items look like

Multiple choice: "must be true" and "cannot be true"

In SHL's mixed General Ability test, deductive items show a short block of facts on the left and the question with five radio buttons on the right. The facts were typically about people, places or quantities: who travelled on which trip, how often each shop is cleaned, how many units each salesperson sold, how long each person has worked somewhere. The question was one of two:

• "Welche Aussage muss wahr sein?" (Which statement must be true?)
• "Welche Aussage kann nicht wahr sein?" (Which statement cannot be true?)

The premises mixed orderings ("more often than", "longer than"), ratios ("twice as long", "five times as long"), exact values ("exactly eight") and bounds ("one year or more"). Most items resolved with one or two lines of algebra or a quick sketch. The difficulty came from the options: four of them were usually things that could be true in some arrangement, and only one was forced.

Interactive: schedules, rankings and calendars

The interactive version replaces options with tasks:

• Timeline scheduling. A day bar from 9:00 to 18:00 with grey busy blocks; you drag tasks of 30 minutes to 1.5 hours into the gaps, in 30-minute steps. Constraints include "must be finished by 12:00", "as late as possible", or one task that must come before another.
• Ranking with badges. Six people, each with a clue card ("comes directly after X", "is not third", "exactly one person between Y and Z"); you drag badges 1–6 onto them.
• 30-day calendars. You select up to five days that satisfy rules about weekdays, days off and gaps between visits. The tips screen defines "Werktage" (working days) as Monday to Friday.

Clue wording was sometimes ambiguous (two readings of "as far from X as Y"), and one task demanded the earliest possible schedule ("schnellstmöglich"), where a valid schedule with a spare day was still wrong.

The logic you need

Four statement types

Quick check: draw two or three circles. If you can draw the premises in a way that makes the conclusion false, the conclusion does not follow.

Conditionals (if… then…)

From "If P, then Q":

• P is true → Q is true (valid).
• Q is false → P is false (valid, the contrapositive).
• Q is true → P? Unknown (affirming the consequent).
• P is false → Q? Unknown (denying the antecedent).

Must, could, cannot

For any statement about a puzzle, ask two questions: is there at least one arrangement where it is true, and is there at least one where it is false?

• True in every arrangement → must be true.
• True in some, false in others → could be true (wrong answer to both question types).
• False in every arrangement → cannot be true.

Original practice questions with answers

1. Syllogism: all and no

Premises: All analysts in the team use Python. No one who uses Python works in the Lisbon office.

Does each conclusion follow? 1. No analyst in the team works in the Lisbon office. 2. No one in the Lisbon office is an analyst in the team. 3. Some Python users are not analysts in the team.

Answer: 1 follows, 2 follows, 3 does not follow.

• Analysts sit inside the Python circle, and the Python circle never touches Lisbon, so no analyst is in Lisbon (1).
• "No A are B" can be reversed, which gives 2.
• 3 may be true in real life, but the premises allow the team's analysts to be the only Python users.

2. Syllogism: some and no

Premises: Some managers are engineers. No engineers are interns.

Does each conclusion follow? 1. Some managers are not interns. 2. No managers are interns. 3. Some interns are not managers.

Answer: 1 follows, 2 does not follow, 3 does not follow.

• The managers who are engineers cannot be interns, so at least some managers are not interns (1).
• Managers who are not engineers could still be interns, so 2 is not forced.
• Every intern could be a (non-engineer) manager, so 3 is not forced either.

3. Conditional: which must be true?

"If the shipment arrives before noon, the team starts the audit the same day. The team did not start the audit today."

(A) The shipment arrived after noon or not at all. (B) The shipment arrived before noon. (C) The team will start the audit tomorrow. (D) The audit was cancelled. (E) If the team had started the audit, the shipment would have arrived before noon.

Answer: (A). The consequence (audit today) did not happen, so the condition (arrival before noon) cannot have happened: that is the contrapositive. (C) and (D) add information. (E) reverses the conditional.

4. Quantities: which must be true?

In a quiz, Mia scored 3 points more than Noah. Omar scored twice as many points as Noah. Pia scored fewer points than Mia. Nobody scored fewer than 2 points.

(A) Omar scored more than Mia. (B) Noah scored the fewest points. (C) Mia scored at least 5 points. (D) Pia scored more than Noah. (E) Omar and Pia scored the same.

Answer: (C). Noah has at least 2, so Mia (Noah + 3) has at least 5. Test the rest with small numbers:

• Noah = 2 gives Omar 4 and Mia 5, so (A) can be false.
• Noah = 4 and Pia = 3 makes (B) false and (D) false.
• Noah = 2 and Pia = 4 makes (E) true, but only in that case.

All of them are only "could be true".

5. Ordering: which cannot be true?

Six speakers, A to F, present one after another. F presents first. C presents immediately before E. A presents after D but before B.

(A) D presents second. (B) E presents last. (C) C presents fifth. (D) B presents fifth. (E) A presents immediately before B.

Answer: (D). D, A and B appear in that order, and C-E is a pair. List the possible orders:

• F D A B C E
• F C E D A B
• F D C E A B
• F D A C E B

B is fourth or sixth, never fifth. Each other option appears in at least one list. If you do not want to list every order, test the answer options directly: try to place B fifth, and you will find that the C-E pair and the D-A pair cannot both fit in positions 2–4 and 6.

6. Interactive-style: book a room

Two meeting rooms are bookable from 9:00 to 17:00 in 30-minute steps. Room 1 is booked 9:00–10:30 and 13:00–15:00. Room 2 is booked 10:00–11:00 and 14:00–16:00. Each room needs 30 minutes of cleaning between two bookings. Find the earliest 1.5-hour slot in Room 2.

Answer: 11:30–13:00.

• Before the 10:00 booking, a new meeting would have to end by 9:30 to leave cleaning time. That leaves only 30 minutes.
• After the 11:00 booking, cleaning runs until 11:30, and the next meeting must end by 13:30.
• That gives a two-hour window, and the earliest 1.5-hour slot in it is 11:30–13:00.

The traps are 11:00–12:30, which ignores cleaning, and anything based on Room 1, whose bookings do not matter here.

7. Interactive-style: rank the badges

Five colleagues handled different numbers of tickets. Rank them 1 (most) to 5 (fewest). Kai handled more than Lena but fewer than Adrian. Mara is ranked directly below Kai. Lena is not last. Tim is ranked below Lena.

Answer: Adrian 1, Kai 2, Mara 3, Lena 4, Tim 5.

1. Adrian > Kai > Lena, with Mara directly after Kai, gives the chain Adrian, Kai, Mara.
2. Lena comes after Kai. She is not last, and Tim is below her, so Lena takes 4 and Tim 5.
3. Check: Adrian cannot be below Kai, so this is the only order.

Traps and how to avoid them

• "Could" is not "must". In a "must be true" item, four options are often possible but not forced. Find one arrangement that breaks each option.
• Unconstrained people. If a person is compared only with A, nothing follows about how they relate to B. In one real item, one element was compared only with the largest value, so nothing followed about its position relative to the smallest one, and the tempting "X is the smallest" option was wrong.
• Bounds hide answers. A rule such as "has worked there one year or more" supplies the minimum that makes an option impossible. Write the bound down.
• Pigeonhole counts. Six places shared among five people means someone appears twice, so "everyone goes exactly once" cannot be true.
• Parity and whole numbers. "Half as many" forces an even number somewhere.
• "Some" means at least one, possibly all. It never implies "some are not".
• Reversing "all" and "if". "All A are B" does not mean all B are A, and "if P then Q" does not mean "if Q then P".
• Real-world knowledge. Accept the premises as given, even when they are odd.
• Earliest versus valid. "As soon as possible" means every step at its earliest legal time.
• Ambiguous clues. Try both readings; usually only one has a solution, and that tells you which reading is meant.
• Buffers, weekends and grid steps. In interactive tasks, check cleaning or preparation gaps, the Monday-to-Friday rule and the 30-minute grid before you drag.

How to prepare for a deductive reasoning test

Target times: 60 seconds for a multiple-choice item, 90 seconds for an interactive one. Keep scrap paper ready; most puzzles get much easier once you write the positions or the inequality chain down.

Sources

• SHL, Verify G+ Test Fact Sheet (10 deductive items; drawing logical conclusions and evaluating arguments)
• SHL candidate practice tests (Deductive Reasoning, standard and mobile-enabled interactive)

Rédigé par

Adrian, spécialiste

MSc Psychologie, 7 ans de tests passés.

Dernière mise à jour : Oct 1, 2026