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Paper Folding

Paper Folding

The paper-folding test from spatial-reasoning batteries, played against the clock. A square sheet is folded once, twice or three times, a hole is punched through every layer, and you pick where the holes land when the sheet is opened out. Every answer is worked out exactly, and the folds get harder as your score climbs.

How to play

Each puzzle is a short strip of pictures read from left to right. The first picture shows the whole sheet with a dashed red line where it is about to be folded and a blue arrow showing which half turns over onto the other. The next picture shows the smaller folded sheet and its next fold, and so on. The faint dashed square behind each picture is the outline of the original sheet, so you can always see where the folded part sits.

The last picture, outlined in gold, shows the folded paper with one or two holes punched through it. The punch goes through every layer at that spot, so a sheet folded twice will usually end up with four holes. Later puzzles also fold along the diagonal, which turns the square into a triangle.

Below are four opened sheets, marked A to D. Tap the one that shows exactly where the holes are when every fold is undone. Only one of them is right; the others are the mistakes people really make, such as forgetting a fold, turning the wrong way or mirroring the whole pattern.

You have ninety seconds. Every right answer scores a point and the next puzzle is drawn at once; after three right answers the folds get harder, moving from one fold to two, then two holes, then diagonal folds and three folds. A wrong answer takes five seconds off the clock and briefly shows you the right sheet so you can see what went wrong.

Tips & strategy

Unfold backwards, one fold at a time. Start from the last picture, where the hole is, and undo only the last fold: the hole gets a twin, mirrored across that fold line. Then undo the fold before it, and every hole you have so far gets its own mirror twin across that line. Two folds make four holes, three folds make eight, unless a hole sits right on a fold.

Use the ghost square to keep your bearings. After two folds the paper is a quarter of its original size, and it is easy to lose track of which quarter it is. The dashed outline behind each picture shows exactly where the folded packet sits on the original sheet, so check which corner it is in before you start mirroring.

Count first, then look at the pattern. The number of holes gives away a lot: one fold and one punch always makes two holes, two folds make four. Several options often have the right count, so after counting, check that every hole is the mirror image of another across the right line — that is where the mistaken sheets give themselves away.

Diagonal folds swap rows and columns. When a square is folded along its diagonal, a hole near one edge ends up mirrored near the neighbouring edge, not the opposite one. Picture turning a page corner down: the point moves from the top edge to the side edge. Once you have that picture, the triangle puzzles are no harder than the square ones.