Time in the 11+ — Questions, Worked Answers and Practice Papers

What examiners actually ask

Time appears in 110 of our 338 ready papers (262 tagged questions). It averages 2.4 questions a paper worth about 1.75 marks each. The typical question allows around 51 sec. It appears in 2 CSSE papers we hold.

Time questions reward careful conversion between hours, minutes and seconds — and punish rushing. Papers ask children to read analogue clocks, work out how long a journey takes, interpret simple timetables, and find start or finish times after a delay. Independent and grammar papers both use multi-step elapsed-time stems where one misread AM/PM or a 60-minute slip costs the mark. Teach a single working unit (usually minutes), write every conversion down, and check the final answer against a rough estimate. Practise both “what time will it be” and “how long between” wording so the method transfers when the story changes under time pressure.

Common mistakes

• Treating an hour as 100 minutes when adding or subtracting times.
• Mixing 12-hour and 24-hour clocks without converting carefully.
• Reading the minute hand correctly but misreading the hour on an analogue clock.
• Forgetting that elapsed time across midnight needs an extra step.

Papers with the most Time questions

Ranked from our tagged catalogue — open a paper to practise the questions that actually test this topic.

Related topics

• Word Problems
• Money
• Addition and Subtraction
• Measurement
• Decimals
• Fractions