Ask any teacher which questions students get wrong most often, and you will not hear "the hard ones." You will hear "the ones they misread."
In a CBT exam with roughly 45 seconds per question, the temptation is to start calculating the moment you see numbers. That is where marks go missing.
Read the last line first
Most questions describe a situation, then ask something specific about it. The situation is context. The last line is the actual question.
A trader bought 120 oranges at ₦25 each and sold two-thirds of them at ₦40 each. What percentage of his total cost did he recover?
If you read top to bottom, you start multiplying 120 by 25 before you know what you are being asked for. Read the last line first and you know immediately that you need two numbers: total cost, and money recovered. Everything else in the question is there to give you those two things.
Check what the options are made of
The options tell you what kind of answer is expected before you calculate anything.
- If they are all percentages, your answer is a ratio, not an amount.
- If three options are close together and one is far away, the far one is usually testing whether you missed a step.
- If the options are in surd form, you are not meant to reach a decimal.
This takes two seconds and saves you from producing a perfectly correct number in the wrong unit.
Identify the trap before you solve
Nearly every JAMB question has one predictable mistake built into it, and one of the wrong options is that mistake's answer. Common ones:
- Two-thirds of 120 is 80, not 40. The question gives you a fraction of a total, not the remainder.
- Percentage of cost means divide by cost, not by revenue.
- Units that change halfway through — grams to kilograms, minutes to hours.
If you can name the trap before you start, you will not fall into it.
Then solve
Total cost: 120 × ₦25 = ₦3,000. Sold: 80 oranges × ₦40 = ₦3,200. Recovered: 3,200 ÷ 3,000 = 106.67%.
The arithmetic was never the difficult part. Knowing which two numbers to divide was.
Practise the reading, not just the solving
When you review a question you got wrong, ask which of these it was:
- I did not know the method.
- I knew the method but made an arithmetic slip.
- I solved a different question from the one asked.
Category 3 is the largest for most students, and it is the fastest to fix — it costs no new knowledge, only a change in how you start.