To some extent, through practice, you can teach yourself to recognize when a question might contain a shortcut. For example, from the problem above, you know that there will probably be a shortcut for all those questions that give you the dimensions of two shapes and ask you to compare them: you can just draw a diagram. A smart test-taker would see the information given and then seize on the simplest route and work out the equations.

You shouldn’t go into every question searching for a shortcut. In some questions, a shorcut may not exist. In others, for whatever reason, you may not find one that does exist. If you have to search and search for a shortcut, it might end up taking longer than the first route to solving the problem that came into your mind. Rather than searching for shortcuts, you should be aware of them. Just knowing shortcuts exist can help you find them; don’t get so focused and frantic about getting a question right that you miss the possibility that a shortcut exists.

Finally, the fact that we advocate using shortcuts doesn’t mean you shouldn’t focus on learning how to work a problem out. In fact, we can guarantee that you’re not going to find a shortcut for a problem unless you know how to work it out the “long” way. After all, a shortcut is just using your knowledge to see a faster way to answer the question. To put it another way, while we’ve been using the term math shortcut, we could just as easily have used the term math intuition. If you don’t have that knowledge base to work from, you’re not going to have anything on which to base your intuition. In contrast, you might be able to figure out an answer by trial and error, even if you don’t see exactly how to answer the problem.