Unit 1
Calendar and Date Counting
About this unit
Master the art of counting sessions, events, and earnings across real calendar periods. You will work with date ranges, weekday patterns, public holidays, and irregular schedules to answer precise numerical questions about time.
What types of questions will you face?
- 1Count total sessions held over a date range, accounting for specific days of the week
- 2Calculate total earnings when different days attract different pay rates
- 3Find the day of the week for a future date using a given starting day
- 4Determine how many performances or classes occur given a weekly schedule and a cancellation
- 5Work out which dates fall on specific weekdays within a given month
Skills you will build
- Converting days into weeks and counting remainder days accurately
- Applying weekday cycling (7-day rotation) to project into the future
- Tracking exclusions and special cases within a date range
- Multi-step arithmetic combining counts, rates, and totals
- Reading and interpreting schedule tables with multiple conditions
By the end of this unit, you will be able to
- Calculate session counts over any calendar period without a physical calendar
- Compute earnings where different days have different rates and some days are excluded
- Work out the exact day of the week for a date far in the future
- Solve real-life scheduling problems accurately under time pressure
Difficulty profile
Questions in this unit are mostly Very Easy to Easy. They reward careful, methodical counting more than advanced reasoning — making this an ideal starting unit to build confidence.
Exam tip: Calendar and Date Counting
Always list out the weeks explicitly when counting sessions. A quick week-by-week tally is faster and less error-prone than trying to calculate totals in your head.
Sample Questions
Let's start with a Selective Thinking Skills staple: counting performances across a date range when some days have an extra show.
Calendar-and-counting items appear regularly on Selective papers — often as a quick early mark if you organise the month cleanly.
The examiner wants you to list every date in the run, count the baseline (evening) shows, then add the extra Monday and Wednesday afternoon sessions without double-counting or skipping boundary days.
You get a fixed start and end date, a rule that applies every day (e.g. one evening show), plus extra rules on specific weekdays (afternoon shows on Mondays and Wednesdays).
Best approach: Sketch a mini calendar for the month. Count total days in the run for the everyday rule, then count how many Mondays and Wednesdays fall inside the range for the bonus shows. Add the three totals at the end.
Question
A play runs every evening from Monday the 2nd to Wednesday the 18th of the same month (inclusive).
On Mondays and Wednesdays there is also an afternoon performance.
How many performances are scheduled in total?
- A20
- B23
- C24
- D26
Decided on your answer? Check how you went below.
Next, a fuller March season problem — multiple weekdays, different show counts on Saturdays, and a fixed month length to anchor the calendar.
Harder Selective calendar questions often span a full month with several day-types and rates or counts per type; they reward systematic tallying over guesswork.
You must build a correct March grid from “1 March is a Wednesday”, count how many Mondays, Thursdays, and Saturdays occur in 28 days, and apply the right multiplier (especially two shows on Saturdays).
A season runs 1–28 of a month with a given weekday for the 1st. Different weekdays have different numbers of performances; Saturday is often the trap (double shows).
Best approach: Because 28 days is exactly four weeks, each weekday appears four times — unless the question says otherwise. Tally Mon ×1, Thu ×1, Sat ×2, then sum. Draw the grid if you are unsure which dates are Saturdays.
Question
A youth orchestra performs a season from 1 March to 28 March (inclusive). The 1st of March is a Wednesday.
The orchestra gives one performance every Monday and one performance every Thursday. It also gives two performances every Saturday.
How many performances will the orchestra give in total?
- A12 performances.
- B14 performances.
- C16 performances.
- D20 performances.
Decided on your answer? Check how you went below.
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