Connection Items
The Assembling Objects section of the ASVAB measures your spatial reasoning skills. It tests your ability to mentally manipulate and compare shapes by connecting, rotating, or assembling them. Because this section asks you to visualize how objects relate to one another in space, it feels different from the other subtests.
The key to success here is don’t get intimidated. You simply need a strategy to solve these, which we will guide you through.
There are two types of questions in this section:
- Connection items
- Puzzle items
For each question, you’ll be given five boxes, each with a picture inside. The box on the far left is the prompt box with the question. The four boxes to the right are your answer options, labeled A, B, C, and D.
Connection items
In the connection items section, you’ll be asked to identify the correct way to draw a straight line from one object to another. In the prompt box, you’ll see two objects, each with a black dot, labeled a and b. Then you’ll be asked to select the answer option that correctly shows how to connect those two dots with a line. The question stem usually reads something like, “Which figure best shows how the objects in the left box will touch if the letters for each object are matched?”
Strategies
Use a three-step process: identify each anchor point, eliminate mismatches, then check the remaining shapes for flips or distortions.
The anchor point is where each dot is positioned on its object. For instance, is the dot on the side of the object or at a corner? If on the side, is it on a curved side, flat side, short side, or long side? Is it in the middle or closer to one edge? Knowing where your dot is on each object is key.
Next, use the process of elimination to rule out options that don’t match your anchor points. Watch for a line attached to the wrong spot, or a dot moved to a nearby but different spot.
Finally, check the options that remain for a mirrored (flipped), resized, or stretched shape. Rotating a shape is fine; mirroring, resizing, or stretching one is always wrong.
Let’s work through an example.
Example 1
Using our process from above, let’s start with dot labeled a and see where it anchors to its object. We would describe it as “on the tip of the triangle”. Checking our answers, all of them have dot a in the correct location, so we cannot eliminate any options yet.
Let’s move to the next dot. Dot b can be described as “in the middle of the straight side” of its object. We can now eliminate answer options B and D, as both have the dot on the curved side rather than the straight side.
We’re now down to just options A and C. The location of the dots and connections is correct in both of these options, but option C shows a mirror image of the triangle - it’s flipped, not just rotated. Thus, option A is our best answer.