About TrainThinking
TrainThinking is an independent, education-focused project with one goal: to make the skills behind clear thinking easy to practise and free to access. Every test, every question and every explanation on the site is written and maintained by one person — Christoph Ballmer, who is also the point of contact for questions, corrections and feedback.
That single authorship is deliberate. A reasoning test is only as good as the explanation attached to each answer, and those explanations are easier to keep consistent when the same person writes and reviews all of them. It also means every page carries a real name rather than a house byline.
Why you can trust what you read here
Written by a named person
Every test, exercise and guide is written in-house by Christoph Ballmer, whose name and background are on this page, and modelled on established frameworks for reasoning.
Reviewed for accuracy
Each question carries a worked explanation, and answer keys are checked and balanced so nothing can be guessed by position alone.
Clear and private
Explanations are written in plain English, there is no account to create, and your answers are scored on your own device — nothing leaves your browser.
How we build the material
Our tests draw on widely used frameworks for evaluating reasoning — including the five-skill structure behind appraisals such as the Watson–Glaser Critical Thinking Appraisal (inference, recognition of assumptions, deduction, interpretation and evaluation of arguments) and the Paul–Elder model of critical thinking, itself grounded in the 1990 APA Delphi Report on expert consensus. Aptitude practice mirrors the formats used in graduate and job assessments.
The complete method — what each test measures, exactly how the score is calculated, and the limits of any result — is published on our test methodology page.
- Explanations first. Every question and exercise ships with a worked explanation, because skills improve fastest when you learn not just whether you were right but why.
- Topics chosen from real demand. Before a page is written, we research what learners actually search for, so the content answers genuine questions rather than guesses.
- Balanced answer keys. Correct answers are distributed evenly across positions, so a test measures reasoning rather than test-taking tricks.
- Private by design. Scoring runs locally in your browser; only your best score is saved on your device, and you can clear it anytime.
- Kept current. Pages carry a visible “updated” date and are revised as the material is refined.
About Christoph Ballmer
Christoph Ballmer is the founder and lead editor of TrainThinking. He writes the questions, the explanations and the guides, and maintains every page on the site.
He holds a Master’s degree in Marketing Management from ZHAW, the Zurich University of Applied Sciences, where the coursework included psychology and perception — how people take in information, and where judgement quietly goes wrong. The tests here work the same ground, which is why they are built to explain every answer rather than only score it. He is based in Switzerland and has run TrainThinking since June 2026.
The working method follows from that background. Before a page is written, the actual search results for its topic are pulled and read: which pages currently rank, what format they take, and what people are asking alongside the query. That research is kept in the project as a written note for every page, and the build refuses to publish a page that does not have one. It is a deliberate guard against writing from assumption — the same failure mode the tests on this site are about.
Question banks are written by hand, one item at a time, each with the explanation attached before the item is considered done. Answer keys are verified by running every bank against its own key, and correct answers are spread across option positions so no test can be gamed by picking the same slot each time. The full procedure is documented in the editorial standards, and how the tests themselves are built and scored is set out in the test methodology.
What Christoph Ballmer has written
All 46 pages below were researched, written and reviewed by the same person. Each one also carries a byline and a visible “updated” date on the page itself.
The organisation
TrainThinking is published by Honeygoat GmbH, based in Reinach BL, Switzerland. The site is ad-supported and, on some pages, uses affiliate links — clearly marked, and never the reason a resource is recommended. See our privacy policy for how data is handled.
Questions, corrections or feedback are welcome at info@trainthinking.com.
What this site is — and isn’t
Everything here is for education and self-reflection. The tests are practice and learning tools, not clinical, diagnostic, or employment-screening instruments, and a result estimates your skill on these questions rather than an IQ or a professional certification.