How SHL Verify Interactive Numerical Reasoning works
Verify Interactive Numerical Reasoning is SHL’s current numerical test, and one of the tests SHL names in place of the multiple-choice Verify Numerical Reasoning it retired during 2024. An information panel gives you the data, such as a headcount, growth rates or how departments compare, and you build the answer rather than pick it from a list. SHL allows 18 minutes for up to 10 questions, adapts the test to your answers and designs it to be sat unsupervised in one go on any device, including a phone. It is pitched at mid-level roles.
SHL’s own example screens show two tasks. In one you set a two-year stacked bar chart, the total and the split of each bar, with up and down arrows, from growth rates in the panel. In the other you are given a company’s headcount and how its departments relate (“twice as many as”, “10 fewer than”) and drag the boundaries of a pie chart until every slice is right. SHL also lists filling in spreadsheets.
SHL says its interactive tests ask fewer questions because they give credit for partly right answers. How that credit is worked out, how the test adapts and whether a calculator is allowed are not published.
How to answer an interactive numerical question
Work out every figure before you touch the chart:
- Read every line of the information panel first. One line usually fixes the total and the others describe the parts.
- Settle the parts given as plain numbers, then the ones defined against them, and subtract to get the last one.
- Write each target figure down before you start dragging.
- Drag for a rough position, then use the arrows for the exact value.
- Check every label on the chart matches your figures before you press Next. You cannot go back.
Worked examples
Pie chart: a depot holds 240 parcels. Express parcels are a quarter of the total, and standard parcels are 30 more than economy. Express is 240 / 4 = 60, which leaves 180. Economy plus standard is 180 and standard is economy plus 30, so economy is (180 - 30) / 2 = 75 and standard is 105. Check: 60 + 75 + 105 = 240. Set the slices to 25%, 31.25% and 43.75%.
Stacked bar: in 2025 a team of 200 is half men and half women. Next year men rise by 10% and women by 15%. Men become 110 and women 115, so the 2026 bar totals 225, and the split is 110 / 225 = 48.9% men and 51.1% women. The split moved even though both groups grew: a percentage of a new total has to be worked out again, never carried over.
Tips for the real test
- Sit SHL’s free interactive numerical practice test, which gives you a report, so the controls are familiar before the real one.
- At 18 minutes for up to 10 questions, keep each one under two minutes.
- Keep rough paper beside you, and check your invitation for what it says about calculators.
- If time is short on a question, set the parts you are sure of. SHL gives credit for partly right answers.
- Watch for growth applied to the wrong base: a rise of 10% each year compounds from the new figure.
Practise Verify Interactive Numerical Reasoning on CogniPrep
Our Verify Interactive Numerical game always runs the full 10 questions on one 18-minute clock. Each is a pie chart to set, a stacked bar chart to adjust or a spreadsheet to fill in, generated fresh from our own templates rather than taken from SHL. Each question is marked on its parts (each slice, each bar figure, each cell), so a mostly right answer earns part of the mark. A fully right answer makes the next question harder and one less than half right makes it easier, and the score weighs each mark by the level it was earned at. That ladder and the marking are ours, because SHL publishes neither. You cannot go back, and when the clock runs out whatever is on screen is marked as it stands.