Gamsat Sample Questions

Decided to change the numbering on the units from here on out because that old method made far too little sense…

Difficulty: Medium

Time: 6 minutes

The passage below has been adapted from That Hideous Strength, by C.S. Lewis.

‘It was the worst dream I’ve had yet,’ said Jane the next morning. She was seated in the Blue Room with the Director and Grace Ironwood.

‘Yes,’ said the Director. ‘Yours is perhaps the hardest post: until the real struggle begins.’

‘I dreamed I was in a dark room,’ said Jane, ‘with queer smells in it and a sort of low humming noise. Then the light came on – but not very much light, and for a long time I didn’t realise what I was looking at. And when I made it out… I should have waked up if I hadn’t made a great effort not to. I thought I saw a face floating in front of me. A face, not a head, if you understand what I mean. That is, there was a beard and nose and eyes – at least, you couldn’t see the eyes because it had coloured glasses on, but there didn’t seem to be anything above the eyes. Not at first. But as I got used to the light, I got a horrible shock. I thought the face was a mask tied on to a kind of balloon thing. But it wasn’t, exactly. Perhaps it looked a bit like a man wearing a sort of turban … I’m telling this dreadfully badly. What it really was, was a head (the rest of a head) which had had the top part of the skull taken off and then … then … as if something inside had boiled over. A great big mass which bulged out from inside what was left of the skull. Wrapped in some kind of composition stuff, but very thin stuff. You could see it twitch, Even in my fright I remember thinking, “Oh kill it, kill it. Put it out of its pain.” But only for a second because I thought the thing was real, really. It was green looking and the mouth was wide open and quite dry. You realise I was a long time, looking at it., before anything else happened. And soon I saw that it wasn’t exactly floating. It was fixed up on some kind of bracket, or shelf, or pedestal – I don’t know quite what, and there were things hanging from it. From the neck, I mean. Yes, it had a neck and a sort of collar thing round it, but nothing below the collar; no shoulders or body. Only these hanging things. In the dream I thought it was some kind of new man that had only head and entrails: I thought all those tubes were its insides. But presently – I don’t quite know how, I saw that they were artificial. Little rubber tubes and bulbs and little metal things too. I couldn’t understand them. All the tubes went into the wall. Then at last something happened.’
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