2026 Year 6 SATs Maths Paper 2 REASONING Walkthrough Tricky Questions

Hello guys, welcome back to another video. My name is Dylan and in this one we're going through, as you can see on the screen, the paper two reasoning from the key stage two sats from 2026. They have been released to the public. They're all on the government website. So, we're going to go through every single question. Now, I've also got the mark scheme up here, which think will be useful to have to explain when there's any intricate detail that said, accept this or don't accept that." So, without further ado, let's jump straight in. Remember, you can like this video already if you know it's going to be good one already. You've watched all our other ones. So you can like it, you know, you can share it with someone who you think might find it useful. But here's question one. Write these numbers in order. Start with the least. We always say that this is very common way to start off this reasoning paper. nice easy one. Place value ordering numbers. Start with the least. want the lowest number here. So got 15500 0. So it's one of these two. That's the least and it's going to be just the five. So 1,5 I'm going to cross it out so don't write the same thing twice. Then it must be 1,50. Now left with the 500s. Which one's bigger? 1,500 or 1,55. Clearly, it's just the one that's 500 and then 1505. You need to get all of those for one mark. Let's take look. going down. Now, what found interesting in the mark scheme, except numbers in reverse order and the label least has been changed. think that's very odd. So, they were allowing children to cross out least, put it on the other side, and then do it themselves backwards. mean, that seems strange to me, but anyway, that's what it's allowed. Question two, 30 pupils were asked how they traveled to school. Complete the graph and show how many children walk to school. Use ruler. Now, don't have ruler, but what can do is show you how children should have worked this out. So, we know there are 30 in total. We have cycle, car, and walk. So, let's take look at how many there are that are cycling. We have got total of five. So, I'm just going to write five here. Car is total of 17. So, do 17 + 5. That gets us to 22. That can just write here. How many are left to get up to 30? So, we're asking 22 + what equals 30? And the answer is 8. So, we need something here that goes up to 8. So, imagine this is ruler. It's not going to be the straightest line in the world, but it's going to go up to eight. It's going to go across and it's going to come down. That's how we get mark. Very interesting. In the mark scheme, it says ignore the width of the bar. So, children could have done very thin bar, very thick bar. The important thing was that it went to eight and you actually get half number of pupil, let's say, discrepancy. So anything up to 8.5, anything down to 7.5, anything in this peri in this kind of area here would have been accepted via the mark scheme. So quite kind mark scheme so far, think. Question three, match each shape to its name. Now here we have total of five shapes. Let me just squeeze them in there. You can see at the top there's sphere and at the bottom there's triangular prism. And the children will be matching this up in any way they see fit. So at the top, for example, they might know this is definitely sphere. So we're just going to match those up immediately. don't know the rest of them, but know this is cylinder. So, I'm going to put this one up to here and then down there. And like said earlier, the children might be understanding of what prism is. And there's only one prism here, and there's only one option. So, they might be left to between these two. Depending on what the ch child actually knows, it will change the order in which they answer this. But then they could look at the names themselves. Triangle based. Well, there's only one there that's triangle based, and it's that one, which leaves the cone down here. So, it's all about the children understanding what they do and don't know, eliminating options by putting together ones that they're confident with, and then just seeing what's left and doing it best fit. But look, as you can see, there's only one mark for that one. So, the children would need to be able to get all of them to be able to get that one mark there. Question four, the table shows the missing numbers of children in each year in school. One, not missing number, one number's missing. The table shows the numbers of children. We have here there are 468 children in the school altogether. How many children are in year four? This is classic question type. We went over this before these stats happened about how we always see parts that are given. In this case, we're given three parts, but there are four parts in total, and we have how many there are altogether. So, we're missing part here. So, the first thing we have to find out what's the total of year 3, five, and six. So, we have 119, 118, and 117. 9 + 8 is 17 + 7 is going to give us 24. 1 plus 1 plus 1 plus 2 is 5. And then 1 plus 1 plus 1 is 3. So that's 354. And then we have to take 468. We're going to take away 354. 8 take away 4 is 4. 6 take away 5 is 1. And then 4 takeway 3 is 1. There are 114 children in year four. If you watched our videos before the ST, you'd realize this is very common question type right here. Question five. Jack buys book for £11.79. He pays for the book with a10 note and a5 note. We even spoke about this. How often there is question about change? How much change does he get? Well, this is clearly going to be £15. Subtract the cost of the book, which is £11.79. Number of ways to do this. We talked about the jumping forward method. You can still do the formal method if you're really confident in exchanging like this. 10 take away 9 is 1. 9 take away 7 is two with decimal place. 4 take away 1 is three. And they cancel out. So it's £321 change. Could have done jumping up from the cost of the book which is £1179 up to 15 again if the children were more confident with that jumping maybe to12 not 12:00 £12 and then jumping up whatever that might be. £321 is the answer there. now we have question six. It's two mark question with show your method. So we know there are going to be some marks on offer here if the children have done full and complete method. Ken has 14 comics. Maria has one more comic than Ken. Stefan has three times as many comics as Maria. How many comics do Ken, Maria, and Stefan have all together? So, there's lots to do here. Ken, I'm going to put as has 14. Maria has one more comic. So, Maria has 15. And we know here Stefan has three times as many as Maria. So, Stefan, we've got to do 15 multiplied by three. However the children do that, end up with 45. So, Stefan has 45. And now we need to find how many altogether. So we do 45 + 15 quarters of an hour. Children might notice that and be able to tell me straight away it's 60. Plus then for Ken we have 14 which gets us to 74 comics in total. Having 74 here gets the child two marks straight away. It says here in the mark scheme if the answer is incorrect award one mark for evidence of an appropriate method. even outlining it's worth writing down here 14 + 1 got you to 15 even though it's very simple so it's worth doing that for sure question seven the grid shows shape and four transformations of the shape so you can see there shape is not shaded in so it stands out and it's labeled as shape and we have four transformations there the question is circle the transformation that is not reflection of shape so we want to see out of those four gradeout shapes which one has not been reflected from when we look at shape So we're looking for this shape. And you can see in the top right hand corner, this is the same. This has not been reflected. It has been translated as in moved, but this has not been reflected at all. So that's the answer there. You had to circle that one. Question eight. Here is shaded parallelogram. Make sure it's on the screen for you. Here is shaded parallelogram on square grid. Draw rectangle on the grid that has the same area as the parallelogram. Now what's important to understand here is there are loads of answers that would be accepted but they all have to have something in common and that is understanding that it has to have the same area. So the first thing we have to figure out is how many squares of space does this shape take up? And you can see in the middle here look 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 in the middle. And what we have to imagine here is see this little chunk here. If move it over there it'll actually turn into rectangle. And we can ignore this now cuz we've moved it. And we can say 13 14 15. So any rectangle that has area of 15. So you could do three across. You could go five down. Anything that does that. You can even go five across and three down. It's up to you. You got have choice there. Now, I'm not sure this is long enough to do 15 by one, but who knows? 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15. Could have squeezed in 15 by one rectangle as well. So there's lots of options there. Excuse my terrible line drawing. Excuse it please. but there is 15. So anything with 15 absolutely would get mark. Question nine. Here are some statements about multiples. Tick the statements that are true. All multiples of nine are multiples of six. That's not true because straight away nine is multiple of nine and it's not in the six times table. All multiples of 20 are multiples of 10. Now that is true because 10 goes into 20 already. That means by definition if it's multiple of 20 it must be multiple of 10. All multiples of five are multiple of 10. No, we can tell straight away. Well, that's not true. Is five in the 10 times table? No. Immediately wrong. Neither is 15, 25, 35. Anything that ends in five is not multiple of 10. That's not true. All multiples of 10, multiples of five. That is true because we know if it's multiple of 10, it ends in zero, which means it is definitely multiple of five as well. The mark scheme is very clear here. You get one mark for both. You have to have done both. Question 10. Amir makes necklace with blue and red beads. For every five blue beads, there are three red beads. There are 30 blue beads in the necklace. What is the total number of beads in this necklace? And once more, this is two- mark question. The mark scheme says, "Award two marks for the correct answer of 48." So if the child has written 48 down, they get the two marks there. However, what you're going to get one mark for in this test is if the child has done full and complete method. And it's important to show that. So let's do that right now. For every five blue beads, there are three red beads. There are 30 blue beads in necklace. So we're basically trying to maintain this ratio. For every five, there are 30. So that's six lots of five. Do the same over here. What's three lots of six? It's going to give us 18. So if there are 30 beads, blue beads, sorry, that means there are 18 red beads. Therefore, the question says the total number will be 30 + 18 and that's where we get 48 from. Question 11. This rectangle has length of 16 cm. The perimeter of the rectangle is 50 cm. What is the width of the rectangle? really good question here. classic perimeter problem solving question where the children may or may not have seen question like this before but we can apply what we know about perimeter. So if the total perimeter is 50 and we know the length is 16 what's this width going to be? Well every single side of this rectangle adds up to 50. But what we do know is if we cut in half 50 and we get 25. We know that this plus this is going to be 25 because that is the same length as this one plus this one. So we know that 60, excuse me, plus something equals 25 will give us this width. What do we add to 16 to get 25? It's just 9 cm. Clearly 9 cm here. And if we really want to check it out, we can we can do 16 9 then 16 would be across the top and nine would be over that side because opposite sides on rectangle are equal length. And then we can add those all up and we would get to 50. And that proves it. So the answer there is nine for one mark. Question 12. There are two marks on offer here. You get two marks for all three. If the answer is incorrect, you get one mark for getting two correct. So you need two at least here. Round 349,99 to the nearest 10. Well, everything's going to be the same until we get to the 10ens, and it's going to be just 10 because 9 is the number in the ones, and that rounds up. To the nearest 100, we get 349,000. And then it's going to be just 900 because again, in the 10's column, we have zero. So, that's going to just stay where it is and round down. And then to the nearest thousand, we have 300. And and this is where it's tricky because it changes quite lot. It's right on the edge. It bumps it way up to 350,000. Even though we're rounding to the nearest thousand, the 10,000 column changes because we're already at 9,000s here and it has to round up because the number in the hundreds is nine. So, we're rounding up there. It affects the number quite lot. Probably if had to assume out of the three, this is the one that most children will be slipping up on. Down here, question 13. Draw lines to match each group to the proportion shaded. love this question because we have some decimals, percentages, we have whole mix. So, I'm just going to zoom out very quickly so you can try and get all of them on the page, which you can see there. And what I'd be doing here is even if just write it as fraction and then think what's the decimal equivalent and then what's the percentage equivalent. If write them all around here and the children do that, can just see where does it match up. clearly it's 50%. Here, this is 3/4. There is no 3/4. Keep going. know that's 0.75. look straight away. 0.75. So, children understanding how to change between fractions, decimals, percentages is key here. Here the fraction is three out of five. It's easy to write as fraction when it's picture like this. Is there 3 out of five? No. But there's 2 out of three. So it must be the other one. And it is in fact 0.6. That is equivalent to 60% and 3 over 5. And down here we have 4 over 6. If we simplify that, we get 2 over 3, which means it matches up here. Writing things down is key to understanding and making sure we get it right. That's for sure. Let me zoom back in and see if can fit this whole thing. yes, just another two marker. Another show your method. We know by now the mark scheme says if you get the answer right, it's two marks, but you have to show you're working out in order to get one. Three oranges and two pineapples cost £46 together. Oranges cost 36p each. What is the cost of one pineapple? Firstly, let's figure out the cost of all of these oranges. So, we get 36p multiplied by 3 and we're going to get 6 3es are 18. 3 * 3 is 9 + 1 is going to be 10. So, that's going to be 108p or we can write it as £18. Now, let's take £46, which is the total cost of everything. Let's take away the cost of the banana. not bananas, the oranges. They don't look anything like bananas. Please comment if you're here bananas in the comment section below. Let's see how many comments we can get that just say bananas. And anyone who's not got to this point, we're thinking, "What on earth is going on?" Let's take away 8. Of course, there's going to be some double exchanging here just to make our life even more tricky. And then we'll go to 16. 16 takeway 8 is 8 9 and decimal place and then £2.98 is the answer. So we know that both of these pineapples cost £2.98. So the final thing to work out the cost of one pineapple we're going to take £2.98. Going to do short division divided by two and we get two into go four times with one left over and it's going to be 149. Put that in there and 149 gets you two marks straight away. If the child has done every single step here in the working out but done an arithmetic error somewhere that is going to get them mark and this is what the test says right here the the mark scheme sorry if the answer is incorrect award one mark for the appropriate method like we said award one mark for sight of 298 or 298. So this is being very kind. It's giving mark for seeing that you've got to this stage here. Maybe not even that you've worked out dividing but you've got this answer 298. So very nice mark scheme. We've seen it before where it just says you need the full method. let's go down now to question 15. Write the missing numbers to make these divisions correct. Classic powers of 10 question here. What do you divide 24 by to get 2.4? It's just shifting down one place. So that's just going to be 10 here. Very interesting. We can use what we know at the top to help us here. So we're still going to divide by 10 to get 2.4. What do we have to divide by again to get 1.2? Well, we're going to have to half it again. So, what we've got here is divide by 10, divide by two. And if we're really strong on our factors, we know that's the same as dividing by 20. So, this one here is going to be 20. And then we can use what we know in this question. 24 / 20 is 1.2. So, want to keep it as 1.2. But look, what start with gets 10 times smaller. So, if want to maintain that, need to have what I'm dividing by get 10 times smaller. I'm just going to divide by two. And at each point, you can double check by doing it. 2.4 divided by two. Yeah, half of that is 1.2. to and it works every time. Just like we've seen before when there are three boxes but two marks, you need all three to get two marks, but you need to get two of them to get one mark. If you only wrote this down and the child just put that as their answer, they would not get any marks at all. Even if it's correct, they need to have at least two correct. Question 16, we've got here, circle the fractions that are less than 2/3. So, the ones that we have to circle are 5 9ths, 4 9ths, and 3 9ths. And we can see straight away, guess that makes sense because these look bigger. But how do know exactly? Well, notice this. All of these are in ninths. That's really important. So, let's change 2/3 into 9ths. 3 to 9, that's multiplying by three. So, to maintain equivalence, do the same to the top. It's going to be 6 9ths. Once we've got that, it's so simple. Anything less than six, the numerator, we're going to circle. Anything more, we're going to leave there. The next part of question 16 is here. Circle the fractions that are greater than two- fifths. Notice they're all in eighs. So that now becomes bit more of an issue. Okay, how can get it into that? I'm like, how can go from fifth to eighth? Just find common multiple. Okay, so we can do 5 * 8 gives us 40 and multiply the top by 8. So we can get 1640ths. At this point, we can go through this whole process, start working out. Okay, cool. It's more, it's less, whatever. Another thing that we can do very quickly here is notice that two fifths is less than half. So any fraction that's equivalent to half or more is going to get circled. So 48 is half. That's more than two- fifths because 2- fths is less than half. 68 is more than half. 5/8 is more than half. Something else we can notice. I'm just trying to do some shortcuts here. Obviously children could just go and find the common multiple like said, but we could also notice that if the numerator is the same 2 and two, fifths are going to be bigger than eights. So 28 is smaller. Okay? That's really important to recognize there. 28 is smaller than 2 fths. And again here, look, 38. If we wanted to, just to make really sure, we can change it to 40ths, times it by five, got 15 40ths. 15 is smaller than 16. And I'm circling ones that are greater. So just notice this up here. We were circling less than. Now we're circling greater than. lot of children will just brush over that and go straight in their heads just being less than still. And also the denominators are different. So number of ways of trying to compare fractions. Hopefully got few examples there. I'm not suggesting that we do one or the other here for sure. It's down to what you and your children are confident with. But it's interesting that we can have some shortcuts sometimes. That's for sure. Question 17 here. Amina is on holiday in France. She sees this road sign. Paris 320 km. How many miles does Amina need to travel to get to Paris? Now we have this conversion here that 5 miles equals 8 km. So the way we work this out is we take how many kilometers there are and we divide this by 8. So 8 into 32 go four times and then that's just placeholder. And then we think okay now need to multiply it by 5. So 40 multiplied by 5 to get up to the 5 per 8 km is going to give us 200 miles. And that's the answer that gets you the mark. Question 18. line makes an angle with the x-axis as shown. Calculate the side size sorry of angle Now this is just straight up one marker. How do we work this out? Well opposite angles like this between two straight lines they are equal. So we know this is 35°. This is something we need your six children to just know the rules of angles and how to work out what angles are based on simple rules like this. Any two straight lines that intersect these opposite angles are equal. So if that's 35, how can work out Well, we know and an an axis and axis. They are going to give us right angles where they intersect. So, we know right angle is 90 for everything here. So, if part of it is 35, what do we need to make up to 90? And the answer is 55° because 55 + 35 that's the worst five I've ever drawn in my life. Equals 90°. hope you put bananas in the comments by the way. want to make people confused. Megan buys six cans of beans. Another two marker making sure we show our working out. The total mass of the cans is 2.49 kg. What is the mass of one can in So firstly 2.49 kg. want to just convert that straight away into grams cuz want my answer in grams. So there's 1,000 in kilogram. So I'm going to say this is 2,490 This is six cans. So now we've done that. Let's take our 2,490 and let's just divide that by six. Sixes into 24 go four times. Six into nine go once. So three left over. And then sixes into 30 are five. 415 grams. That conversion there, we see this lot in the sats. Something's given in kilograms, changes to grams, could be milliliters to liters, could be any kind of measurement where there's some converting going on. Centimeters, meters, millimeters. It's just built to try and trick and it's something to be really aware of. Question 20. Two mark question for this one. Mabel has some 5p and 2p coins. She has total of 41 Complete the table to show how many of each type of coin she she could have. One row has been done for you. So, we need it to add up to 41p. What could the next one be? Now, here's the issue. We can't have an even number of 5p coins cuz imagine we have two 5p coins. That's going to be 10 And that means we need to make 31p. We can't do that with 2 This is always going to be an even number. So, we need the 5 to always be an odd number. So here we can have three 5ps. That gives us 15 And then what do we need to add to that to get to 41p? And you can see straight away it's going to be 26. So that's going to be 13 cuz then 15 + 26 = 41. Remember we can't have even. So let's go to five 5ps. So that's going to be if find bit of space here, 25 plus what gives you 41 That's going to be 16 So, how many twops gets us to 16? It's going to be eight. And then last one here, seven 5ps. 7* 5 is 35p. I'm going to squeeze at the bottom. What do we add to get to 41 It's going to be 6 So, how do make 6 and 2 coins? have three of them. We would probably see lot of children when they know it's 6 just writing six in here instead. And we have to be really careful and really understand and read the question. And that's where understanding this question is barrier. The math here is relatively simple. We're doing the two times table, the five times table, adding them up. The trick here comes in actually understanding the question and it being embedded in something as tricky as that. Question 21. you guessed it. It's another two markers showing your method. Kirsty mixes blue paint and yellow paint. Two- fifths of her mixture is blue paint. She uses 3.5 of blue paint. Now, here's something interesting. I'm going to just draw out. we have fifths. So, like to do bar model to represent that. And we know that two- fifths is blue. Okay? Okay, so that's blue, blue, which means the rest is yellow. Cool. We know there are 3.5 of blue paint. So, we know that two of these bars are 3.5 So, what we have to do, let's figure out what one of those bars is going to be. We're going to do 3.5 divided by two. Two's into three go once with one remaining. Put your decimal place in. Two's into 15 seven times with one remaining. So, have to put placeholder for to make 10. Twos into 10 go five times. So each of these is 1.75 1.75 which means we have three of them for yellow. So how many liters of yellow paint does Kirsty use? Well, she uses 1.75 Three lots of that. So we're just going to put it into short multiplication. 5 * 3 is going to get us 15. 3 * 7 is 21. Add the one there is 22. And then 3 * 1 is going to give us 3 plus the two there is 5. 5.25 25 lers of yellow paint. Again, the mark scheme, if you put this, the child gets two marks. It says, "Award one mark for evidence of an appropriate method." but maybe there's been an error along the way. And it's being kind. It's giving you one mark for sight of 1.75 or the equivalent. So, again, writing this out is really key because it might give you mark just for getting this far. Very kind. seen lot in the past where it doesn't do that. So, nice mark scheme. Question 22. We have here on this number line three is halfway between the missing number and 10. What fantastic question. love this question. Anything that's maybe slightly different to what we've seen before, but still tests understanding of maths think is good. So if this is halfway, well, you know this jump, how do know the jump from 10 to three? Well, it's number bonds. know it's jump of seven. I'm going to take away seven. So if that's halfway, it means have to do the same again. So it's actually quite simple. This is just going to be three, subtract seven. It's going to go through zero. We can break it up however we want. We could do jump of three and jump of four, but we get to -4 as our answer or minus4. And then down here, what numbers halfway between 20 and minus 100? Something that we have to do when we're finding halfway between two numbers is what's the total difference? So minus 100 and then to positive 20 is 100 + 20. So it's 120 in total. Half of that means that's going to be 60 on either side. So we can either jump up 60 from minus 100 to get -40 or we could have jumped down 60 from 20. we'd still end up at minus40. Whatever the child is more confident with, that's what the answer will be. this one, this saw people talking about this one when it's been published say, my goodness, this was tricky one." So, let's take look. William asked some children to choose their favorite club. The pie chart shows the results. So, here we have the clubs and we have couple of fractions, couple of percentages. Three children chose swimming. How many children did William ask altogether? Wow, this is tricky question. So, we know three children chose swimming. What we have to do is find out what fractional percentage this is. That's what we have to find out. And think the best way to go about this will be to do percentages. So, we've already got football and art is 50%. Combined. 1/5 is equal to 20 over 100 which is equal to 20%. So we have gym was 20% of people. Drama is one quarter. Now know that's 25 over 100 or 25%. So we can say okay drama was 25%. And now we can add up all the percentages we've got. We've got 50% for football and art, 20% for gym and 25% for drama. If we add all of these up we get 95% not four, 95%. That means that swimming is the remaining percentage to get to 100. So swimming is 5%. So we know that 5% of the children asked is three. Let's just get up to 100. Let's use these building blocks of 5%. If 5% is three, 50% was 30. Easy. And if 50% was 30, how do get to 100% from 50%? just double it. So 100% it was 60. So we get the answer down here of 60. tricky question because understanding what to do there are many steps. We have to work backwards. Knowing swimming is three is cool. Knowing it's three children, okay, but we need to understand what's the percent of everything. We have to do some converting. We have to do some adding, see what's left. And then finally, even when we get there and see what's left, we have to get it back up to 100% to know what the full pie chart would have been. Very tricky question, especially for two marks. I've seen three mark questions before that have similar amount of working out. So, do think that is rather tricky one. The mark scheme says award one mark for evidence of an appropriate method. If the answer is wrong, award one mark for sight of 5%. Or just seeing that we get to this point of working out what percentage swimming is or 0.05 or 120th or anything that's equivalent like that. So again, mark scheme in general with these two mark questions was nice. Seeing sight of being halfway there did often get mark. So, if you want to see the final paper, the final reasoning paper, paper three for math, make sure you subscribe, like, and it will be on this channel. Go and find it. I'll see you next time for another video. Bye-bye.