Visualising Solids - Question Type 2

The following items also test your ability to visualise three-dimensional figures. Each item consists of two illustrations showing a transparent cube with one or two cables in its interior. The first illustration (left) always shows the view from the front. In the picture on the right, the same cube is illustrated again. Your task is to determine whether the picture on the right shows that cube from the right (r), left (l), from below (w), above (a) or behind (d).

		(A): r (B): l (C): w (D): a (E): d
Here you see the cube from the front!				Here you see the cube from    ?

In the picture on the right, you see the cube from above. On your answer sheet, you would mark the (D).

These items can be solved in one of the following two ways:

• Imagine that the cube had been placed on a glass table and that you could walk all the way around it. Standing to the right or left of the table, you look at the cube from the right or from the left. If you go behind the table, you look at the cube from behind. If you come back to the front of the table and bend over it, to look at the cube from above, and if you imagine yourself lying down underneath the table, feet first, you see the view from below.
• Or you imagine that you could pick up the cube and turn it around in your hands. If you looked at the cube from the front, i.e. from the position shown in the left-hand illustration, and then tipped it towards you by 90 degrees, not changing your own position at all, then you would see the view from above. If you looked at the cube from the front and then turned it 90 degrees to the right you would see the view from the left. If you turned it from the starting position 90 degrees to the left, you would see it from the right. And if you turned it 180 degrees to the right or left from the starting position you would see it from behind. Finally, if you tipped it backward, you would see it from below