Communication with customers and employees plays a particularly important role in day-to-day work. Here it is particularly important not only to understand the language, but also to have a certain understanding of words and language in order to be able to correctly understand and classify the meaning of words. In this way, you can avoid misunderstandings or embarrassing situations with your interlocutors. It is therefore not surprising that a verbal reasoning test is an integral part of many recruitment tests in the selection process for applicants. With the verbal reasoning test, recruiters primarily want to check your vocabulary and verbal intelligence.
What to expect in the verbal reasoning test
According to linguists, in order to be able to understand more than 85 percent of all English-language texts, you only need to know about 1,300 terms – interesting, right? Incidentally, animals can also understand the meaning or meaning of verbal utterances to a limited extent: For example, they listen to commands or recognize their names spoken aloud.
Of course, our understanding of the language is on a completely different level. Determining this is one of the tasks of verbal reasoning tests. Therefore, checking your vocabulary and your language logic is part of the recruitment test. Last but not least, your feeling for language, your understanding of the text and your power of deduction will be the focus here. For example, you have to examine relationships between words, draw conclusions from given statements or analyze texts and reproduce content.
These tasks will test your word and language understanding
Not everyone has a large vocabulary or knows how to understand synonyms or use them correctly. This can easily lead to misunderstandings. It is all the more important to interpret words correctly and to be able to fall back on a good and broad language level. For this reason, some word and language comprehension tasks are often asked in recruitment tests.
After all, you want to make sure that you understand the English language and that you can use it sensibly in the communication context. In the aptitude test for verbal thinking, tasks on the same word meaning, sentence completion and language analogies are very popular. But also finding common ground and a generic term from groups of words or understanding the content of longer texts are typical tasks that are part of language comprehension.
Find common ground and generic term
Many terms can be assigned to a number of different groups, among other things they can be sorted according to where they have something in common. Or you can assign them to certain categories, i.e. generic terms. For example, airplane and car are means of transport, pine and oak are both types of trees, miles and kilometers are distances, etc. Your task in the language understanding test is, for example, to filter out from a group of five words all those words that have something in common.
Same word meaning (synonyms)
The German language is particularly extensive and is characterized, among other things, by the fact that there are often several words for one and the same thing. That’s called synonyms. A synonym of word meaning is word sense, a mobile phone is usually called a cell phone and money is a currency, a means of payment and much more. Language comprehension exercises require you to find another word with the same meaning for a given term or to filter out two words with the same meaning from a series of words. The reverse exercise “Which word doesn’t fit?” requires you to identify the only non-matching synonym.
Sentence completion
Filling in sentences with missing words is a great way to increase your vocabulary. At the same time, you train for various language comprehension tests that test precisely this ability. Among other things, you should choose the one word from a series of words that logically completes the previous sentence.
Language and word analogies
The term analogy means similarity, agreement or sameness. In word analogy tasks for language comprehension, you are usually given three words: There is a certain relationship between the first two and you should choose which of the answer options expresses a similar relationship to the third term. Would you like an example?
The sea is to rushing like the wind is to…?
- Storm
- Air
- Blewing
- Tornado
The correct answer here can only be blewing. Storm, air and tornado are not in the same relation to wind as the rushing is to the sea.
Text comprehension
There are two variants of exams dealing with understanding longer texts: you get a text to read or it is read out loud for all examinees. You will then receive questions whose answers result from the text you have just read or heard. Depending on the level of difficulty, applicants may or may not be allowed to take notes on what they have heard. An ideal training for attention and understanding in connection with language.
Tips for your verbal reasoning test
You’re probably aware by now that your school education probably didn’t prepare you perfectly for aptitude tests in all areas. Thanks to our online language comprehension training, you can fill in small and large gaps without going back to school. Our experience and close cooperation with HR managers offer you the best possible support on the way to a successful recruitment test.
