Folding, punch & plan–side
The harder spatial block — stay calm.
← All countdown tipsHarder spatial questions ask you to unfold a punch, or to match a plan (bird’s-eye) with a side view. Slow down: draw the fold, mark where the hole goes, then open it. Guessing from “it looks a bit like that” is how marks vanish.
Picture it: fold once, punch once, unfold
One fold acts like a mirror. A hole through both layers becomes two holes, reflected across the fold line.
Remember — three jobs
Fold & punch
Each fold mirrors the hole. Count layers.
Plan view
From above. Height disappears; footprint stays.
Side / front
Height shows. Depth can hide behind the front stack.
Exam trap
Unfolding but forgetting the mirror. The hole stays in the same corner of the page instead of flipping across the crease. For views: counting hidden cubes that you cannot see from that direction.
✗ Same corner twice
✓ Mirror across the fold
Question patterns you might see
1 · Simple — One fold, one hole
- 1Sketch the square and the dashed fold.
- 2Mark the punch on the folded piece.
- 3Unfold: copy the hole across the fold like a mirror.
- 4Two layers → two holes (unless the punch was on the fold itself).
2 · Simple — Hole on the fold
If the punch sits on the crease, unfolding can give a hole that sits on the centre line — sometimes looking like one hole, not two, because the two layers shared the same punch.
3 · Medium — Two folds (quarters)
Fold in half, then half again. One punch through four layers → up to four holes, in a rectangle of reflections. Unfold in reverse order: last fold first.
4 · Medium — Plan of stacked cubes
From above you see footprints. Numbers in the squares (if given) tell you how tall that stack is. A “2” next to a “1” is not two cubes beside each other in the plan — it is height.
5 · Trickier — Front vs side elevation
Front view: how it looks facing the front face. Side view: step to the left or right. A cube hidden behind a taller stack does not appear in that elevation. Count visible silhouettes, not the total cube count.
Plan
Front
Side (from right)
taller stack shows; depth hides
6 · Trickiest — Fold, punch, then rotate the paper
Some options show the correct holes but the sheet turned 90°. Match the fold line as well as the holes. If the crease was vertical, a horizontal crease with the same holes is a rotated distractor.
Correct — vertical crease
Trap — same holes, turned 90°
Coach tip: for punch questions, always unfold on the page in tiny sketches. For cube buildings, draw plan, front and side as three separate doodles before looking at options.
Tomorrow (D-7): multi-step word problems.
Next step
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