Both Salisbury Grammar Schools include Verbal Reasoning questions – South Wilts have a whole VR paper, whereas BWS include it within the broader English / Verbal Reasoning paper.
Verbal Reasoning aims to assess the ability to understand and analyse language, to comprehend and use words, to identify patterns and relationships between words, and apply logic and reasoning to solve problems.
Types of Verbal Reasoning questions include:
- Words closest in meaning (synonyms)
- Words opposite in meaning (antonyms)
- Missing Three-Letter Word
- Hidden Four-Letter Word
- Compound Words
- Odd Word(s) Out
- Words with more than one meaning
- Complete the word in the same way
- Move a letter
- Number series
- Number sequence
- Missing Numbers
- Complete the Sum
We appreciate that to many of you looking into the 11+ for the first time, the list may itself appear like word soup, but we are more than happy to talk you through what it means and what it looks like in reality.
There are a number of techniques that pupils learn in order to solve verbal reasoning questions. We also recommend that building a child’s vocabulary is key to scoring well in verbal reasoning.
Drop us an email if you’d like to chat it through and we can talk you through some sample questions.