Rail, transit, road transport, maritime, and logistics · suite apt-096-maritime-deck-roles · generated 2026-09-15T15:32:20.514Z
Private practice result. Not an official exam certificate, employer decision, hiring signal, admissions decision, or guaranteed outcome. Scores stay on this device unless you export them.
Answer keys and scoring logic stay server-side and are never included in any download or export.
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.
Practice attempts are stored on the device you used, never on an account. Exporting a result is the only way anything leaves that device.
| 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.
Rotation, folding, views, orientation, maps, and three-dimensional visualization.
Spatial reasoning is the ability to turn an object in your head and be right about the result: to tell a rotation from a mirror image, fold a flat net into a solid and know which faces meet, read plan and elevation views back into a three-dimensional shape, and hold your own orientation steady while a route turns underneath you. It is a heavily weighted construct in pilot and aircrew selection, firefighter and military technical batteries, architecture and design admissions, and trades screening where a drawing has to be built. Much of it can be trained by replacing imagination with a checkable procedure. Practice is device-local unless you export it.
What you should be able to do after this lesson:
Rotation preserves handedness; reflection reverses it: A figure carries three distinguishable marks (say a red band, a blue band and a yellow band), which read red, blue, yellow going clockwise around its centre. Rotating that figure in the plane, by any angle, never changes that clockwise order: it still reads red, blue, yellow clockwise from whatever mark you start at. Mirroring it reverses the order, so a reflected copy reads red, yellow, blue clockwise. That single check answers the whole is-this-a-rotation-or-a-reflection family without imagining any motion. It works on letters, which is why no in-plane rotation of the letter R produces a backwards R, and no rotation of a lower-case b produces a d: b and d are mirror images across a vertical line, and turning one will never give you the other. Contrast b and q, which are related by a half turn and therefore genuinely are rotations of each other. The distinction is exactly what the clockwise-order test measures. In three dimensions the equivalent is handedness at a corner: pick three edges meeting at a vertex, and a rotation preserves whether they form a right-handed or left-handed set while a reflection swaps it. This is exactly why most Western dice, viewed at the corner where the 1, 2 and 3 faces meet, show those numbers running anticlockwise, and a die showing them clockwise is a mirror-image die rather than a differently rotated one. The one honest limitation: a figure with its own mirror line looks identical after reflection, so the test decides nothing for symmetric shapes, which is precisely why item writers use asymmetric ones.
Cube nets: two apart in a strip means opposite: A net made of six squares. Four of them, call them A, B, C and D, sit in a horizontal strip left to right. Square E sits directly above B, and square F sits directly below B. Fold it. The strip of four wraps around the cube as a band, so squares two apart in that strip end up on opposite faces: A is opposite C, and B is opposite D. E and F are the remaining pair, and they become the top and bottom, opposite each other. The two rules that solve almost every net item are exactly these. Squares separated by one square in a straight line end up opposite. Squares sharing an edge on the net end up adjacent on the cube, and can never be opposite. Everything else is applying them carefully. A die adds one more constraint worth carrying: opposite faces of a standard die sum to seven, so 1 faces 6, 2 faces 5 and 3 faces 4, and a net showing 1 and 6 two apart in a strip is consistent while a net showing 1 and 2 two apart is not a standard die. The classic error on these items is trying to fold the net in your head all at once. Do not. Pick one square as the base, identify its opposite by the two-apart rule, then repeat for a second pair, and you have determined the cube in two cheap steps rather than one expensive act of visualisation.
Three views, one solid, and the cubes you cannot see: A solid is built from unit cubes on a base one cube deep and three cubes wide. The column heights, left to right, are 3, 1 and 2. The front view is therefore a staircase profile of heights 3, 1, 2. The side view, looking along the row from the right, is a single column three cubes tall, because the tallest column hides the others behind it. The plan view is a three-by-one rectangle. Total cubes: 3 plus 1 plus 2, which is 6, and here the three views pin it down exactly because the plan view tells you the solid is only one cube deep. Now change one thing. Suppose the plan view is three by two, so the solid is two cubes deep. The front view can still read 3, 1, 2 while the count is anything from 6, one row of cubes with a hollow back, up to 12, a solid block matching the front profile in both rows. The views constrain the shape but do not determine it, and a well-written item will either supply the count or ask for the minimum and maximum rather than a single figure. That is the trap in this family: candidates who assume every hidden position is filled will over-count, and candidates who assume nothing is hidden will under-count. Read the plan view first to establish the footprint, then use the elevations to cap each column, then ask explicitly whether the item wants the minimum, the maximum, or a determined value.
Punched and unfolded, with coordinates: Take a square sheet 8 units across, with the origin at its centre so the corners are at plus or minus 4 in each direction. Fold the right half onto the left half across the vertical centre line, then fold the bottom half up onto the top half across the horizontal centre line. What is left visible is one quarter, the region where x runs from minus 4 to 0 and y runs from 0 to 4. Punch a single hole at the point minus 3, 3. Now unfold, one step at a time, and treat every unfold as a reflection. Undoing the horizontal fold reflects across the line y equals 0 and adds a hole at minus 3, minus 3. Undoing the vertical fold reflects both existing holes across x equals 0 and adds holes at 3, 3 and 3, minus 3. The finished sheet has four holes, at all four combinations of plus or minus 3. Two rules generalise from this. The number of holes is one punch multiplied by two for each fold the punch passed through, so two folds give four holes and three folds give eight, provided the punch went through every layer, which it does when the folds are through the middle. And the positions are mirror images across each fold line, never rotations. That second point is where the marks go: candidates who place the fourth hole by rotational symmetry get three holes right and one wrong, which is exactly the answer option the item includes.
Bearings, and the difference between the map and the walker: A walker leaves a gate, goes 300 m due north, then 400 m due east. The straight-line distance back to the gate is the hypotenuse of a 300 by 400 right triangle, which is 500 m: the 3-4-5 triangle, so no calculator is needed. The bearing from the gate to the walker is measured clockwise from north, and it is the angle whose tangent is 400 over 300, which is about 53 degrees, so the bearing is 053. The return bearing is that plus 180, which is 233. Bearings are always three digits and always clockwise from north, so 53 degrees is written 053 and a bearing of 350 is very slightly west of north, not south. Now the other half of this construct, which trips up more people than the trigonometry. You are facing south and you turn left. Which way are you now facing? East. Your left hand points east when you face south, and the standard wrong answer, west, comes from reading left as left-on-the-map while forgetting that the map is drawn north-up and you are not. The general fix is to state your heading before every turn and rotate your frame with the traveller: facing north, left is west; facing south, left is east; facing east, left is north; facing west, left is south. On route items, physically rotate the page so the direction of travel points up before working out a turn, and rotate it back only to read off the final compass direction.
What a cut actually reveals: Cross-section items ask what shape a plane makes as it slices a solid, and the reflex answer of circle is wrong most of the time. A cylinder cut perpendicular to its axis gives a circle. Cut parallel to the axis, it gives a rectangle. Cut obliquely so the plane crosses only the curved surface, it gives an ellipse; cut obliquely so the plane also crosses one flat end, it gives an ellipse with one side sliced flat, a D-shape. A cone is richer, because its sections are the conic sections that give the family its name: perpendicular to the axis gives a circle; an oblique cut that crosses every side of the cone gives an ellipse; a cut parallel to one slanted side gives a parabola; a cut parallel to the axis gives a hyperbola branch; and a cut through the apex gives a triangle. A cube is the one that surprises people. A cut parallel to a face gives a square, obviously. A cut through three vertices that are mutually adjacent to one corner gives an equilateral triangle. And a cut through the midpoints of six edges, perpendicular to a long diagonal of the cube, gives a regular hexagon: a six-sided section from a six-faced solid with no curves anywhere. For a flat-faced solid, work these by counting faces rather than by visualising: the section of a convex polyhedron gains exactly one straight edge for every face the plane passes through, so a cut crossing six faces of a cube must close into a six-sided figure and a cut touching only three cannot have more than three sides. For curved solids the question becomes whether the plane meets the curved surface all the way round, which gives a closed circle or ellipse, or only partway, which leaves an open arc closed off by a straight chord.
Educational preparation only. Novus Learn does not administer official exams and does not guarantee scores or hiring outcomes.
Sustained focus, selective attention, and accuracy under time pressure.
Attention and concentration is the skill of still noticing on minute forty of a checking block as reliably as you did on minute two, and of pointing the noticing at the right thing when two things compete. It has three distinguishable parts - selective attention, sustained attention or vigilance, and divided attention - and assessments load them differently: cancellation and checking tasks load vigilance, conflict tasks load selection, and dispatch-style monitoring loads division. It is the construct that decides whether a records clerk, a dispatcher, an air-side controller or a quality inspector catches the one wrong digit in a shift. Practice here is device-local, with no account and nothing uploaded.
What you should be able to do after this lesson:
A cancellation count you can actually check: Count every 7 in this row: 4 7 1 7 7 3 9 7 2 8 7 5 7 6 0 7. Working left to right and tapping once per hit: hits at the second, fourth, fifth, eighth, eleventh, thirteenth and sixteenth positions. That is seven sevens. Two error modes produce nearly all the wrong answers. The first is the adjacent pair - the 7 7 at positions four and five gets counted once, because the eye takes a repeated character as one perceptual object. The second is losing the place after the 9, where the visually similar 9 and 7 force a moment of re-checking and the scan restarts a character early, producing an over-count of eight. The defence for both is a fixed scan path with a physical anchor: a fingertip or cursor moving one character at a time, never jumping back. Re-scanning to check is the thing that creates the double-count, so if you must verify, verify by counting a second time from the RIGHT-hand end and comparing totals, never by re-reading part of the row.
Hits, misses and false alarms: the eager candidate loses: A checking batch contains 300 records, 40 of which are genuinely faulty. Candidate A flags 46 records and 36 of them are truly faulty. Hits 36, misses 40 minus 36 equals 4, false alarms 46 minus 36 equals 10. Candidate B flags 38 and 34 are truly faulty: hits 34, misses 6, false alarms 4. On hit rate alone A wins, 36 out of 40 which is 90 percent against B's 34 out of 40 which is 85 percent. Now apply the scoring rule that most checking tasks actually use, where a false alarm cancels a hit: A scores 36 minus 10 equals 26, B scores 34 minus 4 equals 30. B wins by four despite catching two fewer faults. This is why 'flag anything that looks odd' is bad advice on a scored checking task, and why the first thing to read on a checking item is whether wrong flags are penalised. Your response criterion - how much evidence you demand before flagging - is adjustable, and it should be set from the scoring rule, not from your temperament.
The transposition that passes every gist check: Compare these two lines and decide whether they match. Invoice 4820-7391-06. Invoice 4820-7931-06. They do not: the middle group reads 7391 in the first and 7931 in the second, with the 3 and the 9 swapped. Transpositions are the most-missed error class in record checking for a structural reason - the character SET is identical, the length is identical, the first and last characters of the group are identical, so every fast check the visual system runs comes back clean. Substitutions and omissions change the character inventory and get caught; transpositions do not. Two habits raise the catch rate. Read digits in fixed groups of two rather than as a whole number, so 73-91 against 79-31 becomes a mismatch at the first group instead of a subtle difference somewhere in a four-digit blur. And check groups in a deliberately non-natural order - last group, first group, middle group - because reading left to right lets the confirmation you built at the start carry you through the middle, which is exactly where the swap is usually planted.
Conflict: why reading fights you: The classic demonstration is Stroop's, published in 1935: the word RED printed in blue ink, with the instruction to name the ink colour. Naming takes measurably longer, and errors go up, because reading a familiar word is automatic and cannot be switched off, so the automatic response has to be suppressed before the controlled one can be produced. The same conflict has a numeric version you can test on yourself in a second: how many characters are in the string 4 4 4? The answer is three, and the digit 4 pulls at you the entire way. In an assessment this appears wherever the salient feature and the asked-for feature come apart - a chart where the tallest bar is not the answer to the question, a form where the highlighted field is not the one being verified, a row where the bold total is not what the stem requested. The practical move is to name the target feature out loud before you look - 'ink colour', 'character count', 'the value for March' - because pre-loading the target biases selection before the automatic reading response gets a chance to win.
Where the errors actually appear in a 45-minute block: Errors in a long checking block are not spread evenly. Mackworth's 1948 clock-watching study established the pattern that gives the effect its name: detection declines over a prolonged watch, with the sharpest deterioration early rather than at the very end. Practically, on a 45-minute self-timed checking block, expect your per-minute error rate in minutes 20 to 45 to run visibly above minutes 1 to 20 even though nothing about the material changed, and expect the subjective sense of effort to lag the actual decline, so it will not feel like you are getting worse. Two things work against it. Break the block into three fifteen-minute segments with a ten-second reset between them - look away, unfocus, breathe out - which costs thirty seconds of a 45-minute block, about one percent of the time, and buys back more than that in caught errors. And score your practice by segment rather than as one number, because a single overall accuracy figure hides exactly the information you need: whether your problem is skill, which shows as flat error rate, or endurance, which shows as a rising one.
Two streams: alternate on a cadence, do not try to merge: A dispatch-style monitoring task: keep a running total of the numbers announced on channel one while watching channel two for the code word AMBER. Genuine simultaneity is not available - the two tasks compete for the same control resource - so the choice is not whether to alternate but whether to alternate deliberately or accidentally. Deliberate looks like this: fix the arithmetic to a rhythm, updating the total only at each announcement and holding a single number between updates, which frees the gaps for channel two. If the total is 34 and the next announcement is 7, you spend under a second reaching 41 and then you are free again. Accidental looks like re-deriving the running total from the beginning because you did not trust it, which locks up the whole window and is when AMBER goes past unheard. The measurable failure of divided attention is almost never a failure to hear the target; it is a failure to have any spare capacity at the moment it arrived. The related phenomenon worth knowing is inattentional blindness, illustrated by Simons and Chabris in 1999: an unexpected and perfectly visible event is missed entirely when attention is committed to a counting task.
Educational preparation only. Novus Learn does not administer official exams and does not guarantee scores or hiring outcomes.
Forces, motion, gears, pulleys, levers, fluids, pressure, and basic machines.
Mechanical comprehension is the ability to predict what a physical system will do (which way a gear turns, how hard you have to pull, how far the load actually rises) from forces, moments and the simple machines, rather than from a memorised formula sheet. It carries real weight in apprenticeship entry batteries, military technical selection, and screening for maintenance, machine operation and rigging roles. The same reasoning is daily work on site: sizing a jack, choosing a block-and-tackle arrangement, deciding why a belt slips under load but not at idle. 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:
Levers: balance the moments, then name the class: A wheelbarrow carries 60 kg whose centre of mass sits 0.4 m from the wheel axle, and you grip the handles 1.2 m from that same axle. Take moments about the axle: lift force x 1.2 m = 60 kgf x 0.4 m, so the lift force is 60 x 0.4 / 1.2 = 20 kgf, about 196 N. The mechanical advantage is simply the arm ratio, 1.2 / 0.4 = 3. Two traps live in this item. The first is measuring the load arm from your hands instead of from the fulcrum; the arm is always the perpendicular distance to the pivot, and the pivot here is the wheel contact, not the barrow body. The second is calling it a first-class lever because that is the one everyone pictures. A wheelbarrow is second class: fulcrum at one end, load in the middle, effort at the far end, which is why its mechanical advantage is always greater than one. Compare tweezers or a pair of tongs, where the effort sits between fulcrum and load: that is third class, mechanical advantage below one, and you are deliberately trading force away to buy speed and control at the tip. Your own forearm lifting a weight is the same arrangement, which is why a 5 kg dumbbell loads the biceps far more than 5 kg.
Gear trains: tooth counts set speed, meshes set direction: A 12-tooth driver turning at 300 rpm meshes directly with a 36-tooth gear. The ratio is driven teeth over driver teeth, 36/12 = 3:1, so the output turns at 300/3 = 100 rpm and, ignoring friction, carries about three times the torque. One external mesh reverses rotation, so the output turns opposite to the driver. Now drop a 20-tooth idler between them. Step it through: 300 x 12/20 = 180 rpm at the idler, then 180 x 20/36 = 100 rpm at the output. The overall ratio is unchanged at 3:1, the idler's tooth count cancels, but there are now two external meshes, two reversals, so the output turns the SAME way as the driver. That is the whole reason idlers are fitted. The tempting wrong answer treats the idler as another reduction stage and reports 180 rpm or some product of both ratios. The check that never fails: only the first and last gear in a simple train affect the ratio, and the direction depends on whether the number of external meshes is odd (reversed) or even (same). An internal or ring mesh, as in a planetary set, does not reverse at all.
Pulleys: count the rope parts that carry the load: A 200 kg load, about 1,962 N. Hung from a single pulley bolted to a beam, the pulley only changes the direction you pull; both rope parts still meet at a fixed axle, the mechanical advantage is 1, and you pull the full 200 kgf. Hang the pulley on the load instead, with one rope end anchored above and the other in your hands, and two rope parts now support the moving block: mechanical advantage 2, effort about 100 kgf or 981 N, but you must pull 2 m of rope for every 1 m the load rises. Build a tackle with four parts supporting the moving block and the effort falls to 200/4 = 50 kgf, about 490 N, at the cost of 4 m of rope pulled per metre of lift. The trap is counting sheaves instead of supporting parts. A three-sheave arrangement gives three parts if the dead end is made off to the fixed block and four if it is made off to the moving block, and the answer differs by 33 percent. The second trap is treating the figure as delivered force: real sheaves lose a few percent each to bearing and rope friction, so quoted mechanical advantage is the ideal velocity ratio, and the effort you actually feel is higher.
Hydraulics: pressure is shared, force and travel are traded: A jack has a 2 square centimetre input piston and a 50 square centimetre output ram. Push the small piston with 100 N and the pressure in the fluid is 100 / 2 = 50 N per square centimetre, which is 500 kPa. Pascal's principle says every part of the confined fluid sees that same 500 kPa, so the large ram feels 50 N/cm2 x 50 cm2 = 2,500 N. Mechanical advantage 25. Nothing is free: fluid is effectively incompressible, so volume in equals volume out. A 25 cm stroke on the small piston moves 2 x 25 = 50 cubic centimetres, and 50 cubic centimetres spread over a 50 square centimetre ram raises it 1 cm. Twenty-five centimetres of pumping buys one centimetre of lift: exactly the force-times-distance bargain a lever strikes. Candidates lose this item by assuming both pistons travel the same distance, or by concluding the jack manufactures energy. A related item asks about a tank: the pressure at the bottom depends on the height of fluid above and its density, not on the width of the vessel, so a narrow 3 m standpipe reads the same bottom pressure as a 3 m deep swimming pool.
Belts and chains: same belt speed, different rpm: A motor pulley 100 mm in diameter runs at 1,450 rpm and drives a 250 mm pulley through an open V-belt. The quantity that is genuinely shared is belt speed, not rpm, so the driven pulley turns at 1,450 x 100/250 = 580 rpm. Note the direction of the ratio: with gears you divide by driven teeth, with belts you divide by driven diameter, and the arithmetic looks the same only because both are proportional to circumference. An open belt drives both pulleys the same way; a crossed belt reverses the driven pulley, which is the entire point of the classic crossed-belt diagram item. The trap is slip. A flat or V-belt under an overload slips, so the driven speed falls below 580 rpm while the motor holds 1,450: the symptom of a glazed belt or a weak tensioner. A chain or a toothed timing belt physically cannot slip a tooth without damage, which is why camshaft and indexing drives use them and why a belt-driven answer and a chain-driven answer to the same question can legitimately differ.
Springs in series and parallel: the answer most people reverse: Two identical coil springs, each 20 N/mm. Mount them side by side, both carrying the same load, and they act in parallel: stiffness adds to 40 N/mm, so a 400 N load compresses the pair 400/40 = 10 mm. Now stack them end to end, in series. Each spring carries the whole 400 N, force is not split down a chain, so each deflects 400/20 = 20 mm and the total is 40 mm. The combined stiffness is 400/40 = 10 N/mm, half of one spring. Most candidates reverse the two because 'series' sounds like the case where things add. Two reliable checks: in parallel the arrangement is always stiffer than one spring, and in series it is always softer than the softest spring. That is also why suspension designers add a helper spring in parallel to raise rate under load, and why a long slender bolt clamps more forgivingly than a short stubby one carrying the same preload.
Educational preparation only. Novus Learn does not administer official exams and does not guarantee scores or hiring outcomes.
Answer keys and scoring logic stay server-side and are never included in any download or export.
Formal suite answer keys and scoring logic stay on the server and are not part of any download, in any format. Downloadable keys exist only for the open, untimed practice material (the practice packs on the puzzles, cognitive-skills and reasoning practice lab pages), where the answers are already public teaching content.
Novus Learn needs no account. Your practice history lives in this browser's storage on this device, and is sent to a server only if you create an account and switch on backup. This file contains no attempt, session or result link, so it is safe to share.