Reading is the largest single section of the GAN battery and the most time-pressured: 42 questions in 25 minutes works out to roughly 36 seconds each, including the time you spend reading the passage. It is not a vocabulary test and it is not a test of what you know about the trade.
That is about 36 seconds per question. This section is one of six on the battery, which runs about 140 questions in roughly two hours — see the full GAN aptitude test breakdown for how the whole thing fits together.
Whether you can pull a specific fact out of a dense technical paragraph under time pressure — which is most of what a first-year apprentice does with a spec sheet, a code book, or a work order.
Whether you can separate what a passage actually says from what you assume it means. Apprentices who guess at instructions instead of reading them are expensive and dangerous, and this section is a cheap proxy for that habit.
Every correct answer is supported by something written in the passage. If you find yourself reasoning from job experience or general knowledge, you have already left the passage and you are probably being steered toward a distractor. When two answers look defensible, the right one is the one you can point at a sentence for.
Skimming the questions before the passage tells you what to look for, and turns a slow read into a targeted search. On short passages this costs more than it saves, so use it selectively — the moment a passage runs past a screen, question-first pays.
At 36 seconds a question you cannot afford a single long stall. Give any question 45 seconds maximum, mark it, and move. A question you skip costs one point; a question you sit on costs that point plus the two or three easy ones you never reach.
Distractors are frequently built by taking a true statement and over-stating it — "always", "never", "all", "only". Technical writing is usually hedged, so a sweeping answer is often the wrong one. This is not a rule to follow blindly, but it breaks a lot of 50/50s.
One email, no spam — the section-by-section plan built around this battery.
42 questions in 25 minutes, which is about 36 seconds per question including reading time. It is the largest section of the roughly 140-question battery.
No. The passages are often technical in tone, but every answer is contained in the text. Bringing outside trade knowledge is usually what leads applicants into a wrong answer.
On a long passage, skim the questions first so you know what to hunt for. On a short one, just read it. The goal is to avoid reading a long passage twice.
Ready to sit the whole thing? Take a free full-length practice test in the GAN format — timed sections, no calculator, instant scoring.
Reading about a section and scoring on it are different things. The app has ten full-length timed batteries plus dedicated reading drills, so test day is your eleventh run at it, not your first.
Download on the App StoreiPhone & iPad · free to download · 7-day free trial on Pro