Follow the Pattern
There might be a couple of problems asking you to identify the number sequence. These will be super easy to answer. Just determine what the number pattern is.
Imagine you were given the following number sequence: 2, 4, 6, 8. Can you guess what number comes next? If you answered 10, then you already have this part covered. To answer number sequence problems, subtract the difference between adjacent two numbers. In our example, 4 -2, 6 – 4, 8 – 6 yields 2 as the answer. Therefore, two is the pattern so to find the next number add 2 to 8. The next number in the sequence is 10.
A number sequence doesn’t always have the same number in the pattern.
Our first example was really easy since each number is the sequence had a difference of 2. Let’s take it up a notch. What if our sequence was: 2, 5, 11, 20? Can you spot the pattern?
We see the pattern is adding 3 to each previous difference. The first difference is 3, but the next one is 6 (3 + 3). The next difference adds 3 to 6 to get 9. Logically, we would then add 3 to 9 to get our next sequence difference which is 12. We add 12 to the last known number in the sequence to get our answer. Adding 12 to 20 yields 32 as the next number in the sequence.