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How Top-Front-End Works
The Item Format and Official Rules
Summary
Two views given, one withheld
Every Top-Front-End item begins with one solid object drawn three times over: once looking straight down at it, once looking at its front, and once looking in from its end. The item shows you two of those three drawings and withholds the third. Four candidate drawings follow, labeled A through D, and exactly one of them is the drawing that was withheld.
The panel marked "?" is the entire question. You are never asked what the object is for, how big it is, or what it is made of — only what it looks like from the one direction the item declined to show you. Why each panel sits in the corner it does is the next topic's business; for now, take the arrangement as given.
The official rules
The section states its terms before the first item, and every clause earns its place.
- "The pictures that follow are top, front, and end views of solid objects." There are three views, they have fixed names, and there are no others. Every drawing in the item — the two you are handed and the four you choose between — is offered as one of those three.
- "The views are without perspective: points in the viewed surface are shown along parallel lines of sight." Nothing recedes and nothing foreshortens. A face at the back of the object is drawn exactly the size an identical face at the front would be drawn. Distance from the viewer changes nothing.
- "Two views are shown, with four alternatives to complete the missing view — select the correct one." Four alternatives, one answer, every time.
You will have noticed dashed lines in the drawings. They are neither decoration nor smudges, they carry real information about the object, and they get a lesson of their own later in this unit.
Exactly one option is correct
One of the four drawings is the withheld view; the other three are not. The four are also always four different drawings — an item is not issued until three wrong answers exist that each differ from the right one and from one another. So if two options look identical to you, they are not identical, and you have simply not found the thing that separates them yet. The difference is guaranteed to be there. It is not guaranteed to be large.
The asked view is the front view.
Name the withheld view before you look at the options
The withheld view is not fixed. An item may hold back the top view, the front view, or the end view, and the empty panel moves to wherever that view belongs. Compare the item below with the one above: same format, different question.
This is why the first move on every item is to read which view is being asked for and name it — out loud in your head, in one word. Judging a drawing "correct" without knowing which view you were judging it as is a coin flip, and it is the cheapest possible mistake to eliminate.
Where the section sits
Top-Front-End is questions 16 through 30 of the Perceptual Ability Test: fifteen items in a single block. Everything above applies to all fifteen without exception, so you can walk into the section already knowing what every item will look like. Generate as many as you want in the top-front-end practice generator.
The takeaway
An item is one object, two of its three views, and four drawings of which exactly one completes the set. The views are top, front and end, drawn without perspective along parallel lines of sight. Which view is withheld changes from item to item, so name it first — before a single option gets your attention.
Practice Questions
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