RankHighCompetitive Exam Prep

Operations with letters and numbers

This is the only subject area the guide guarantees. It says all examinations in this series will include it, and all three county announcements read in September 2026 carried it. The task is to read, compare, check, reorder and count letters and numbers to a stated instruction — and the difficulty is entirely in sustaining accuracy, not in the reasoning.

On every examination
Yes — the guide says so
Published question formats
Four worked samples in the guide
What it measures
Accuracy under repetition

The four formats the guide prints

The guide gives four worked samples for this area, and between them they cover the shapes you should expect: counting how many paired groups of characters are identical, counting how many words in a sentence use a letter more than once, working out which letter stands the same distance after one letter as another does after a third, and counting how often one digit is immediately followed by another in a long string.

None of them needs knowledge you bring to the room. Every one of them can be got wrong by losing your place.

How to work them without losing marks

On the paired groups, compare the first and last characters before the middle. Most non-matching pairs differ somewhere that a glance at the ends will find, and that clears them faster than reading six characters twice.

On the repeated-letter counts, remember the letter has to repeat inside one word. The same letter appearing in two different words is not what is being counted, and that single misreading is the commonest way this format is lost.

On the alphabet distances, count the steps between letters rather than the letters themselves, and count them a second time before you answer. Being one out is the entire failure mode.

On the digit strings, only the digit standing immediately after the first one counts. A matching digit elsewhere in the string is not an occurrence.

Why speed comes last

This area rewards being right rather than being quick, and the two pull in opposite directions when the material is dull. The guide publishes no item count and no per-area timing, so nobody can tell you how many of these you will face or how long you have for them — the only published figure is an overall allowance of three hours for the whole examination.

What that means in practice is that pace is yours to set. Slow down where the work is repetitive, keep your place physically with a finger or the cursor, and treat a lost position as more expensive than a slow comparison, because it is.

Sources

Related guides