GED Math Questions and Answers: 20 Solved, From Easy to Hard

Most GED math questions don’t look like a page full of x’s and y’s. They look like a short story about boots on sale, a phone bill or a fish tank.

The catch? The wrong answers are built to look right. Each one is the number you’d get from a common slip, so “my answer is in the list” proves nothing.

So on this page you’ll get:

• 20 GED-style questions, from easy to hard, across all four areas of the test
• The answer to each one, worked out step by step
• Why the tempting wrong answers are wrong
• The 10 slips behind those wrong answers, and how to catch them

If some of these look scary at first, that’s normal. Every answer shows each step, so even a miss tells you exactly what to work on.

Where these questions come from

Real GED questions aren’t released, so we wrote these ourselves. They follow the four areas and the mix in GED Testing Service’s Assessment Guide for Educators, and we checked every calculation.

Most are everyday jobs, like working out a sale price, a paycheck, a recipe or the fence around a garden. For the full list of what the test covers, see what’s on the GED math test.

How to get the most out of these 20 questions

Reading an answer feels like learning. It’s a bit like watching someone parallel park, though. It looks easy until you’re the one behind the wheel.

Here’s how to turn these 20 into real practice:

1. Answer each one before you look: Work it on paper, pick your choice or type your answer, then tap “Check my answer”. A wrong pick turns red and the right answer turns green.
2. If you miss one, find where you split off: Compare your working with ours line by line. The step where they part ways is the skill to practice.
3. Do the six tagged questions by hand: They say “Doable by hand”. GED Testing Service doesn’t say which questions go in the no-calculator part, so the tag is our best guess, based on how friendly the numbers are.
4. Read the level as a count of steps: Easy is one skill. Medium adds a story to set up or a trap answer. Hard chains a few steps together or makes you pick the method. A hard question often uses the same math as an easy one, with more steps wrapped around it.

The real test also has drop-down, drag-and-drop and hot spot questions. You can try a live one of each in our guide to GED math question types.

1. Numbers, fractions and percents (about 25%)

This is the math of money and measuring. Think of a sale at the store, splitting a bill or doubling a recipe. You’ll use fractions, decimals, negative numbers, percents, ratios and exponents.

Practice this category: Number operations · Fractions, decimals and percents · Ratios and proportions · Exponents and roots

2. Measuring shapes and reading data (about 20%)

Here you measure real things with the formula sheet: the fence around a garden, the height of a TV screen, the water in a fish tank.

You also read data, the way you’d look over your hours for a month. That means finding the mean (the average) and the median (the middle value once the list is in order).

Practice this category: Geometry and measurement · Data, statistics and probability

3. Expressions and equations (about 30%)

This is the biggest area on the test. Picture an equation as a balance scale: whatever you do to one side, you do to the other, and it stays level.

These questions ask you to tidy up expressions, solve equations and inequalities, handle two equations at once, and solve quadratics (equations with an x²).

Practice this category: Equations and inequalities · Expressions and polynomials

4. Graphs and functions (about 25%)

Slope is a rate, like dollars per hour or miles per gallon. It tells you how fast one thing changes as another goes up.

These questions ask for the slope of a line, the equation of a line, what a function gives you for one input, and which of two pay rates is bigger when one is a table and the other is an equation.

Practice this category: Functions and graphing

The 10 slips behind the wrong answers

Every wrong answer choice above came from a real slip. Test writers do this on purpose. They work out what you’d get if you made a common mistake, and put that number in the list.

So finding your answer among the choices doesn’t prove it’s right. Watch for these ten:

1. Going left to right: Order matters, like getting dressed: socks before shoes. Exponents come first, then multiplying, then adding (question 1).
2. Squaring a negative without parentheses: (−2)² is 4. Type −2² into a calculator without parentheses and it shows −4 (questions 1 and 17).
3. Adding fractions straight across: You can’t add quarters of a pizza to sixths until the slices are the same size. Find a common denominator first (question 2).
4. Merging two percents: 20% off and then 8% tax is 0.80 × 1.08. That gives a different total from 12% off (question 3).
5. Dividing by the wrong number for percent change: Always divide by the amount you started with (question 5).
6. Mixing up perimeter and area: Fence and trim go around the edge, so that’s perimeter. Carpet and paint cover the surface, so that’s area (question 6).
7. Finding the median without sorting: Line the values up from smallest to largest, then take the middle one (question 7).
8. Forgetting to flip the inequality sign: When you multiply or divide both sides by a negative number, the sign turns around (question 13).
9. Multiplying only the first term: The number outside the parentheses multiplies every term inside them (question 11).
10. Checking only one point: A line has to pass through every point it’s meant to, so test them all (questions 18 and 20).

Where to practice next

Bottom line: twenty questions show you what the test looks like. The real one is more than twice as long, so the next step is stamina. Think of it as going from a walk around the block to a long hike.

1. Take a full practice test: Our free GED math practice test matches the real length and formats, explains every answer, and gives you new questions each time.
2. Prefer paper? The printable GED math practice test PDF comes with a full answer key.
3. Work on your weakest area: Go back to the area where you missed the most, and use its practice links. The topic practice sets give you 25 fresh questions on one skill, with the working shown. Percent change is a good place to start, in fractions, decimals and percents.

GED.com also has free official test previews. Once you’re scoring well on practice tests, the official GED Ready test is your last check before you book. Our passing score guide explains what a 145 means.