Odd One Out
"Odd one out" is a very common form of
non verbal reasoning question. It's basically an
adbvanced form of the
sets type of question.
Essentially it's testing your ability to look for patterns and similarities in order to classify items. So the way to solve them is to look
for something that is
the same about all the shapes except one.
At its simplest you might have a set of simple shapes like these:
Here the odd one out is D because all the others are closed shapes.
A more complicated example would be this one:
Here the odd one out is A because all the rest are symmetrical around the vertical. Don't be tempted to say that 'B'is the odd one out because
it's the only one with two black sections. That's true, but some of the others have one black section and some have none. You're looking for a feature
that all the pictures share except one. Something where
you can say "All the rest are
this but the odd one out is
that".
Odd one out questions do often involves counting. As with "set" problems, when in doubt count everything! Here's a simple example:
Counting black sections doesn't help, they all have 2. Here E is the odd one out because it's made from 3 outside straight lines (it has three corners), the others are made from 4.
Sometimes you need to compare two different pieces of information, for example:
We might start by noticing that three of the diagrams are symmetrical - but two aren't so that can't be it. Counting the number of
outside lines or corners gives us 4,3,4,4,5 so that doesn't help. The number of black sections is 4,3,3,4,5 which is again no use on its own. Hang on
though! All the pictures except for x have the same number of black sections as outside lines. So C is the answer: in all the others the number of
outside lines is the same as the number of black sections.
So remember: you're looking for something which is the same about all of the pictures except one. Look for symmetry, colours, types of line, dots, etc and count everything!