Problems

 

What are the test problems like?

• Popular outreach
• UKLO problems:
  • all the individual problems used so far (classified for relative difficulty)
  • all the test papers from previous years 
  • ‘Breakthrough workout’ – easy whole-class problems, including seasonal problems
  • Some seasonal puzzles
  • A benchmark collection indicating difficulty levels
  • A small collection of problems created by past champions
• Problems from other countries:
  • From Ireland
  • From America
  • From the International Olympiad
• A powerpoint show for training

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1. Popular outreach
   1. October 2020: A lovely book of linguistic puzzles by Alex Bellos.
   2. Sept 24 2018: Aymara fish in Alex Bellos’s Guardian puzzles (This problem was created by the Americans before UKLO started.)
   3. August 2018: Two tiny problems distributed at the British Academy Summer Showcase in Summer 2018:
      1. Georgian (author: Babette Newsome)
      2. Visible speech  (author: Daniel Harbour)

UKLO problems

1. All the UKLO test problems since 2010, listed individually and graded for difficulty. All include answers and some include explanations.

1. The UKLO test papers and problems from:
   • 2022
   • 2021
   • 2020
   • 2019
   • 2018
   • 2017
   • 2016
   • 2015
   • 2014
   • 2013
   • 2012
   • 2011
   • 2010
2. Breakthrough Workout –  a collection of very easy problems (suitable for Breakthrough level) plus their answers.
3. Seasonal puzzles
4. A benchmark set of problems taken from past competitions, which we aim to match in terms of difficulty in future competitions.
   1. a database listing the problems and showing their relative difficulty (revised Nov 26 2014).
   2. a zipped file containing pdfs of all the problems.

Problems from other countries

1. The past puzzles on the AILO (Irish) website.
2. Over 1,000 past problems  from the North-American (NACLO) website. (Log in as ‘guest’ > ‘guest’.)
   1. A large collection of problems, of different levels of difficulty, on the NACLO (North American) site.
   2. Two books of puzzles in English, complete with solutions and (in some cases) explanations: Dragomir Radev, Puzzles in Logic, Languages and Computation (Springer, 2013). The hardback or e-book edition costs about £30 each (no paperback version available at present); the volumes contain 50+ puzzles each, and the puzzles are classified for difficulty.
3. The very difficult problems for the International Linguistics Olympiad. (Click Problems.)