Rail, transit, road transport, maritime, and logistics · suite apt-371-coast-guard-and-maritime-safety-aptitude · generated 2026-09-15T15:47:03.141Z
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This file contains the whole study outline for this suite: every skill it draws on, the full lesson for each of those skills, worked examples, practice tips, a glossary, and where each piece of material comes from. Nothing here is a summary of a page you still have to visit.
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| Mode | Duration | What it is for |
|---|---|---|
| Guided practice | 15 minutes | Untimed, with feedback after every item. |
| Mini-test | 18 minutes | A short timed set for checking pace. |
| Full simulation | 45 minutes | Full length and full time, in one sitting. |
This suite draws on 5 skill constructs. Each one below carries its complete lesson.
Hazard recognition, safe sequencing, escalation, and risk controls.
Practise recognizing hazards and choosing a safe, proportionate response: protect people, control immediate exposure, use the correct reporting path, and verify that the control is effective.
What you should be able to do after this lesson:
Worked scenario: a damaged machine guard: A guard is loose before a scheduled run. Do not operate the machine or improvise a repair beyond your authorization. Keep people away, isolate or label the equipment only as procedure permits, report the defect to the responsible person, and wait for an approved inspection or repair. A deadline does not remove the hazard.
Risk-triage questions: Ask: what can cause harm, who is exposed now, how severe could the outcome be, what control is available, and who has authority to apply it? The safest answer is not always the most dramatic option; it is the option that controls the real exposure without creating a new hazard.
Educational preparation only. Novus Learn does not administer official exams and does not guarantee scores or hiring outcomes.
Evaluating workplace responses against role-relevant principles.
Learn a repeatable way to compare workplace responses: establish the facts, identify duties and risks, respect role boundaries, then choose a proportionate first action. This is educational preparation, not an official scoring guide.
What you should be able to do after this lesson:
Worked scenario: an unverified safety concern: A colleague reports a possible equipment fault while a deadline is approaching. First distinguish the known fact, the report, from the unverified cause. A strong response protects people and affected work, checks the concern through the right channel, tells the relevant lead, and records what was done. Ignoring the report underreacts; shutting down unrelated work or accusing someone before checking the facts overreacts.
Method: facts, duties, risks, response: Write four short notes before ranking options: what is known, who may be affected, which duty or boundary applies, and what safe next step is available now. Prefer an action that addresses the immediate issue and creates useful follow-through. Do not reward an option merely because it sounds decisive.
Educational preparation only. Novus Learn does not administer official exams and does not guarantee scores or hiring outcomes.
Arithmetic, fractions, percentages, ratios, rates, estimation, word problems, and number relationships.
Numerical reasoning is the ability to take a small set of supplied numbers (a price list, a staffing table, a fuel figure), and reach a defensible answer in around ninety seconds without a formula sheet. It is the most widely used quantitative section in graduate, management and public-sector screening, and it appears in banking, retail, armed forces and healthcare entry batteries alike. The arithmetic itself is deliberately ordinary: percentages, ratios, rates and averages. What is actually being measured is whether you pick the right operation quickly, keep the units straight, and answer the question that was asked rather than the one you started computing. Practice here is device-local: no account, and nothing leaves this device unless you export it.
What you should be able to do after this lesson:
Reverse percentages: the item most candidates get backwards: A subscription price rose by 15 percent and now stands at 57.50 pounds. What was it before? The correct move is to divide, not subtract: the new price is 115 percent of the old, so the old price is 57.50 / 1.15 = 50.00. Check it forwards: 15 percent of 50 is 7.50, and 50 + 7.50 = 57.50. The tempting wrong answer takes 15 percent of the NEW figure, 0.15 x 57.50 = 8.625, and reports 48.88. That distractor is always on the option list because it is what most people do under time pressure, and it is wrong by 2.25 percent, small enough to look plausible. The same asymmetry drives the successive-change item: a price that rises 20 percent and then falls 20 percent does not return to where it started. Multiply the factors: 1.20 x 0.80 = 0.96, a net fall of 4 percent. Starting at 500 pounds you get 600 then 480, not 500. Percentages compose by multiplication; they never add.
Ratio splits: count the parts before you divide: A 4,830 pound budget is split between three teams in the ratio 3:5:6. Add the parts first: 3 + 5 + 6 = 14. One part is 4,830 / 14 = 345. The shares are 3 x 345 = 1,035, 5 x 345 = 1,725 and 6 x 345 = 2,070, and they sum back to 4,830, which is the check you should always run. Two classic failures. The first is dividing by 3 because there are three teams. That gives 1,610 each and ignores the ratio entirely. The second is treating 5 as a fraction and computing five sixths or five fourteenths of something other than the total. The more interesting version of this item gives you a difference instead of the total: 'the second team receives 690 pounds more than the first, what is the whole budget?' The difference between the shares is 5 - 3 = 2 parts, so one part is 690 / 2 = 345, and the budget is 14 x 345 = 4,830. Same number, reached from the other end, and the arithmetic is trivial once you have made the parts explicit.
Rates and units: 2 h 15 min is 2.25, not 2.15: A delivery van covers 174 km in 2 hours 15 minutes. Average speed is distance over time, and the time must be in hours: 15 minutes is 15/60 = 0.25 h, so 174 / 2.25 = 77.3 km/h. Type 2.15 into the calculator instead and you get 80.9 km/h: an error of roughly 4.7 percent that sits comfortably inside the plausible range and will match one of the options. Now extend it. The van consumes 8.6 litres per 100 km, so the trip needs 174 x 8.6 / 100 = 14.964 litres, and at 1.48 pounds per litre that is 14.964 x 1.48 = 22.15 pounds. Notice the units doing the work: (km) x (L / 100 km) leaves litres; (L) x (pounds / L) leaves pounds. If your intermediate line has km still attached at the end, you have divided when you should have multiplied. Write the unit next to every number and the method checks itself.
Unit pricing: normalise before you compare: Three pack sizes of the same fluid. Pack A: 750 ml for 3.60 pounds. Pack B: 2 litres for 9.40. Pack C: 1.5 litres for 7.20. Convert all three to price per litre. A: 3.60 / 0.75 = 4.80 per litre. B: 9.40 / 2 = 4.70. C: 7.20 / 1.5 = 4.80. So B is cheapest by 10p a litre, and A and C are identical despite looking like different deals. The 'bigger pack is cheaper' heuristic happens to hold here but is not a rule, and test writers know it. Half of these items are built specifically so the largest pack loses. Now add the multibuy that these questions love: pack A is on three-for-two. Three packs give 2.25 litres for the price of two, 7.20 pounds, which is 7.20 / 2.25 = 3.20 per litre and beats everything. The trap in the multibuy version is dividing by the number of packs paid for rather than the volume received.
Combined work rates: add rates, never times: Printer A completes a 3,000-page run in 50 minutes; printer B completes the same run in 75 minutes. Running together, how long? Convert to rates: A prints 3,000 / 50 = 60 pages per minute, B prints 3,000 / 75 = 40 pages per minute, and together they print 100 pages per minute, so the job takes 3,000 / 100 = 30 minutes. Verify by counting output: in 30 minutes A produces 1,800 pages and B produces 1,200, which is 3,000 exactly. The two wrong answers you will see on the option list are 62.5 minutes (the average of 50 and 75) and 125 minutes (the sum). Both are impossible on inspection: two machines working together must finish faster than the faster machine alone, so any answer above 50 minutes is wrong before you compute anything. The general form is 1 / (1/50 + 1/75), and it is worth being able to write that line directly, but the sanity bound catches the error faster than the algebra does.
Estimate first, then compute: killing distractors in ten seconds: 'A department spent 847,300 pounds in 2024. In 2025 the budget fell by 12.5 percent. What was the 2025 spend?' Options: 741,387.50 / 953,212.50 / 105,912.50 / 762,570. Estimate before anything else: 12.5 percent is exactly one eighth, one eighth of roughly 850,000 is roughly 106,000, so the answer is roughly 744,000. That single line eliminates three options. 953,212.50 applied the change upwards. 105,912.50 is the size of the reduction, not the resulting spend: the 'answered the wrong question' distractor, and the most commonly selected wrong option on items of this shape. 762,570 is a 10 percent cut, planted for anyone who misread the rate. Exact working: 847,300 x 7/8 = 5,931,100 / 8 = 741,387.50. Doing it as a fraction avoids the decimal multiplication altogether. Learn the fraction equivalents cold (12.5 percent is 1/8, 16.7 percent is 1/6, 37.5 percent is 3/8, 62.5 percent is 5/8) because a fraction turns most percentage items into one division.
Educational preparation only. Novus Learn does not administer official exams and does not guarantee scores or hiring outcomes.
Directions, coordinates, schedules, routes, and navigation constraints.
Map and route reasoning is spatial thinking with a clock attached: bearings and turns, map scale, grid references, and the journey-time arithmetic that decides whether a route is feasible at all. It appears in police, fire and ambulance selection, driver and dispatch testing, military navigation batteries, and any logistics or field-service role where a wrong turn is a missed window. The items are rarely hard mathematically; they are lost by rotating the map instead of the number, by averaging two speeds, or by adding a walking leg to the wrong end of a connection. Your practice attempts are stored on this device and go nowhere unless you export them.
What you should be able to do after this lesson:
Bearings: turn the number, not the map: You are facing north. Turn 90 degrees right and you face 090, east. Turn a further 135 degrees right: 90 + 135 = 225, south-west. Now turn 90 degrees left: 225 - 90 = 135, south-east. The method that survives any number of turns is to hold the facing as a number of degrees clockwise from north, add for right turns, subtract for left turns, take the result modulo 360, and convert back at the end using the eight-point table: 0 north, 45 north-east, 90 east, 135 south-east, 180 south, 225 south-west, 270 west, 315 north-west. Candidates who instead picture themselves rotating lose the left-right convention the moment they are facing south, because on the mental image left now appears on the right of the page. The companion idea is the back bearing: the reverse of a leg is the forward bearing plus or minus 180 degrees, so a leg travelled out on 040 comes home on 220, and a leg out on 250 comes home on 070. Checking that every outbound and return pair differs by exactly 180 catches a dropped turn immediately.
Scale: from the sheet to the ground: On a 1:25,000 sheet, one centimetre of paper represents 25,000 centimetres of ground, which is 250 metres. A path measured at 6.4 cm is therefore 6.4 x 250 = 1,600 m, or 1.6 km. Move to a 1:50,000 sheet and the same 6.4 cm becomes 3.2 km, because each centimetre now stands for 500 m. Two mistakes recur. The first is dividing rather than multiplying, which turns a 1.6 km walk into a 26 m one and should be caught instantly by asking whether the answer is plausible for a footpath. The second is forgetting that a ratio scale carries no units: 1:25,000 means one inch to 25,000 inches just as much as one centimetre to 25,000 centimetres, which is exactly why the printed scale bar is safer than a ruler when a sheet mixes conventions. Finally, map distance is horizontal distance. A route that climbs 300 m over that 1.6 km is meaningfully longer and much slower on foot, which is why walking-time estimates add time for ascent separately rather than inflating the distance.
Grid references: along the corridor, then up the stairs: On a numbered map grid, the four-figure reference 3572 means easting 35 and northing 72. It identifies a whole one-kilometre square, and specifically the square whose south-west corner sits at that intersection: not its centre. To locate a point inside it, divide the square into tenths in each direction: a feature five tenths east and five tenths north of that corner is 355725 in six figures, which pins the position to roughly 100 m. The two failures are reliable enough to be worth naming. The first is giving northings before eastings, so 7235 gets quoted for a feature that is actually at 3572, pointing at an entirely different square or at nothing at all. The second is treating the reference as the centre of the square, which shifts every reported position by half a kilometre to the north-east. The mnemonic that fixes both is 'along the corridor, then up the stairs': you walk along before you go up, and eastings always come first.
Journey time with a stop, and the average-speed trap: A van covers 84 km at an average 56 km/h. Driving time is 84/56 = 1.5 hours, or 90 minutes. Add a 20-minute unload part way and the door-to-door time is 110 minutes, so a 08:20 departure arrives at 10:10. If the receiving bay closes at 10:00, the total budget is only 100 minutes; with the 20-minute stop unavoidable, driving must fit into 80 minutes, and the required average becomes 84 / (80/60) = 63 km/h. That is the shape of most feasibility items: find the fixed time, subtract the fixed stops, and solve for what is left. The trap sits in the word average. Suppose the same 84 km is driven as 42 km at 70 km/h and 42 km at 50 km/h. The mean of the two speeds is 60 km/h, and that is the wrong answer. Add the times instead: 42/70 = 0.60 h and 42/50 = 0.84 h, total 1.44 h, so the true average is 84/1.44 = 58.3 km/h. Average speed is always total distance over total time, never the mean of the speeds.
Routing under constraints: find the one that binds: Depot to site, three options. Route A is 18 km and crosses a bridge posted at 7.5 tonnes. Route B is 14 km but the final 300 m is one-way against you, forcing a 1.2 km loop, so it is really 15.2 km. Route C is 16 km and includes 800 m of school zone limited to 20 km/h between 08:00 and 09:00, where you would otherwise do 40 km/h. Your loaded van weighs 3.5 tonnes and you leave at 08:30. Price the constraints. The bridge limit does not bind at all: 3.5 tonnes is well under 7.5, so route A's restriction costs nothing and A is simply the longest at 18 km. The school zone does bind, but barely: 0.8 km at 20 km/h takes 2.4 minutes against 1.2 minutes at 40, a penalty of 1.2 minutes, leaving C at 16 km plus about a minute. Route B, at 15.2 km including its loop, is still the shortest. The trap is choosing A because it is the option with no restriction that applies, a constraint that does not bind is not a cost, and noticing that is precisely what the item measures.
Timetables: work backwards from the fixed event: Buses leave the depot at five and thirty-five minutes past each hour. The ride to the station takes 25 minutes, then a 6-minute walk to the platform. Trains depart at 09:12, 09:42 and 10:12. To catch the 09:42, you must be on the platform by 09:42, so the latest boarding time is 09:42 minus 25 minus 6 = 09:11. The 09:05 bus qualifies: it reaches the station at 09:30 and the platform at 09:36, six minutes clear. The 08:35 bus is on the platform at 09:06 and would also make the 09:12 with a little to spare. The 09:35 bus reaches the platform at 10:06 and can only make the 10:12. The two errors that cost marks are subtracting the walking time from the wrong end (adding it to the train departure instead of the bus arrival, which manufactures twelve minutes of slack that does not exist), and reading a timetable's arrival column as though it were the connection's departure. Fix the deadline first, list every fixed time in one column, then choose.
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Evaluating evidence, assumptions, arguments, credibility, and alternative explanations.
Critical thinking assessments ask you to take an argument apart: what is being concluded, what it rests on, what evidence would settle it, and whether a proposed conclusion actually follows. Published critical-thinking batteries typically run five task types - inference, recognition of assumptions, deduction, interpretation, and evaluation of arguments - and they are deliberately built so that agreeing with a conclusion and judging the argument as strong come apart. The construct is heavily weighted in policy analysis, audit, legal, investigative and graduate selection, and it is the same skill that stops a plausible chart from turning into a bad decision. Practice stays on this device; there is no account and nothing is uploaded unless you export it.
What you should be able to do after this lesson:
The negation test finds assumptions; nothing else does: Argument: 'The council should fit bin sensors across the district. In the trial depot they cut collection trips by a fifth.' Candidate assumption A: 'The trial depot's waste pattern is broadly representative of the rest of the district.' Negate it - suppose the trial depot is nothing like the rest of the district - and the argument collapses, because a result that does not transfer supports nothing about the district. So A is a required assumption. Candidate assumption B: 'Bin sensors are the cheapest available technology for this purpose.' Negate it - suppose they are the most expensive - and the argument still stands as given, since it argued from a reduction in trips, not from cost. B is not required; it would strengthen a cost-based argument that was never made. Candidate C: 'Fewer collection trips reduce total operating cost.' Negate it and the recommendation loses its point, so C is required too, even though the argument never mentions cost. That last case is the one candidates miss, because the required assumption is what bridges the evidence to the recommendation, and bridging assumptions are by definition unstated. The failure mode across this whole item type is picking statements that support the conclusion instead of statements the argument cannot survive without.
Base rates: 90 percent accurate, 15 percent right: A production line runs an automated defect test. Defects occur in 1 percent of units. The test flags 90 percent of genuinely defective units, and wrongly flags 5 percent of good units. A unit has just been flagged - how likely is it to be defective? Work in whole units rather than probabilities. Take 10,000 units: 100 are defective and 9,900 are good. Of the 100 defective, the test flags 90. Of the 9,900 good, it wrongly flags 5 percent, which is 495. Total flags: 90 + 495 = 585. Of those, 90 are genuine, so the answer is 90 / 585 = 15.4 percent. Better than the 1 percent base rate, and nowhere near the 90 percent that intuition offers. The error has a name - confusing the probability of a flag given a defect with the probability of a defect given a flag - and it has a practical consequence: the rework queue has to be sized for 585 units a batch, not 100, and 495 of the 585 units sitting in it are perfectly good. Whenever a test, screening rule or model accuracy figure appears in an item, ask how many of the negatives there are, because with a rare condition the false positives from a large clean population swamp the true positives from a small affected one.
Three alternative explanations, and the comparison that settles it: Claim: 'Employees who attended the optional resilience workshop took 30 percent fewer sick days last year, so the workshop works.' Alternative one, selection: attendance was optional, so the people who signed up may have been the healthier and more engaged to begin with, and would have taken fewer sick days regardless. Alternative two, reverse direction: employees who were frequently unwell were the least able to attend a full-day workshop, so illness determined attendance rather than the other way round. Alternative three, a common third factor: the workshop ran on Thursday afternoons at head office, so attendance largely tracks being an office-based rather than shift-based worker, and shift workers take more sick leave for reasons that have nothing to do with resilience training. What would settle it: randomly assigning the offer to half the workforce and comparing the two groups. Failing that, the cheapest useful check already exists in the payroll data - compare attendees' and non-attendees' sick days in the year before the workshop. If attendees were already 30 percent lower, selection is doing the entire job. The habit worth building is to name the comparison group before you accept any before-and-after number.
Deduction: affirming the consequent versus modus tollens: Rule: 'If an invoice is over 10,000 euro, it requires two signatures.' Argument A: 'This invoice has two signatures, therefore it is over 10,000 euro.' Invalid - this is affirming the consequent. The rule makes two signatures necessary for large invoices; it says nothing that prevents a cautious manager from double-signing a 400 euro invoice, so a two-signature invoice of any size is consistent with the rule. Argument B: 'This invoice has only one signature, therefore it is not over 10,000 euro.' Valid - this is modus tollens, denying the consequent to deny the antecedent, and it holds assuming the rule was followed. Argument C: 'This invoice is not over 10,000 euro, therefore it does not have two signatures.' Invalid again, denying the antecedent. Two further points that deduction items test directly. First, validity is about form alone: 'All banks close on Sundays; Riverton Mutual is a bank; therefore Riverton Mutual closes on Sundays' is perfectly valid even if the first premise is false, and a valid argument with a false premise can deliver a false conclusion. Second, in these items you must accept the premises as given even when you know them to be untrue, because the question is whether the conclusion follows, not whether it is true.
Interpretation: what a survey figure does and does not license: Data: all 1,200 employees of a firm were surveyed. 62 percent said they would accept a four-day week at 90 percent pay. Of those who said yes, 71 percent were under 35. Conclusion one: 'A majority of this firm's employees would accept the trade.' This follows - 62 percent of a complete census of the firm is a majority, and the conclusion is properly limited to this firm. Conclusion two: 'A majority of the firm's under-35 employees would accept the trade.' This does not follow, and the arithmetic shows why. Sixty-two percent of 1,200 is 744 accepters, and 71 percent of 744 is about 528 accepters aged under 35. That is the composition of the accepters, not the acceptance rate within the under-35 group, and without knowing how many under-35s the firm employs the rate is undetermined: if there are 900, the rate is 528 / 900 = 59 percent; if there are 600, it is 88 percent; if there were 1,100 the rate would be below half. Conclusion three: 'The firm should move to a four-day week.' This does not follow either - a stated preference about pay says nothing about output, shift cover, customer hours or cost. Notice that conclusion two is the base-rate error from the screening example, wearing survey clothing.
Strong and weak arguments on the same question: Question: should the agency publish raw inspection scores for every site? Strong argument for: 'In the neighbouring authority, publication was followed by a measurable fall in repeat violations, which is the stated aim of the inspection regime.' It is directly about this decision, it addresses the regime's own objective, and it offers evidence - and if true it would change your view. Weak argument for: 'Yes, because transparency is always good.' Sweeping, unsupported, and it would apply identically to publishing anything at all, which is the tell. Strong argument against: 'Raw scores omit the severity weighting, so a site with one critical failure can rank above a site with six minor ones, and a member of the public cannot see the difference.' Specific, mechanistic, directly about the proposal, and it would change your view. Weak argument against: 'No, because businesses will object.' It may be true and it may matter politically, but it does not bear on whether publication achieves the regime's aim, and no evidence is offered. Two tests separate strong from weak: is the argument about the exact question asked, and would accepting it change the decision? Note that you can hold a firm personal view on publication and still be required to mark the argument on the other side as the strong one - that split is what the item type is measuring.
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