Unit 12 · Multi-Step Conditional Reasoning
Anita, Brian, Eric, Lee — Age Chain Ordering
Lesson 2 of 30
Age-chain puzzles give you one concrete number and a series of "older/younger by" clues — follow the chain and fill in every age before touching the answer choices.
Deductive age-assignment questions appear in the easy-to-medium band of official NSW papers — they are reliable marks when you build a summary table and verify every option against it.
The examiner checks whether you can follow a chain of relative-age clues from a single anchor value, complete the full table, and identify the one true statement among four carefully crafted distractors.
Five or six children are related by age clues (twins, older by N years, younger by N years, between two ages). One concrete age is given. You find all ages, then test which of four statements is the only true one.
Best approach: Start from the one clue that gives a real number (e.g. Brian = 8). Use each other clue as a stepping stone to the next person. Build a name → age table. Only then check every option against your table — do not guess based on the first option that sounds right.
Question
The children Anita, Brian, Eric, Lee and Zara are all in one family. Lee is 1 year younger than Eric. Brian and Eric are twins. Anita is 3 years older than Lee. Brian is 8 years old. Zara is older than Eric, but younger than Anita.
Only one of these sentences is true. Which is it?
Select an answer to see the explanation.
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