Guessing is a skill, not a surrender. On a four-option question a blind guess is worth 25 per cent; eliminating one option lifts that to 33, and two to 50. Most of the value is in the elimination, not the final choice.
Eliminate before you choose
Start by discarding anything you can rule out with certainty rather than searching for the answer. It is a different mental operation and it usually works when recall does not. Options that are too specific or too absolute are often wrong. ‘Always’, ‘never’ and ‘the only’ are rarely true in general knowledge.
Read the writer, not just the question
Question writers pad four options with two obviously wrong ones, which means the real decision is usually between two. Identify the pair first and you have halved the problem without knowing anything. If one option is noticeably longer or more detailed than the others, it is often the correct one – writers add qualifiers to make a true statement precise.
Know when not to guess
Guessing costs nothing in a standard quiz, so always answer. In formats that deduct for wrong answers, a blind guess is negative value and a two-option guess is roughly break-even. And on a money ladder, a guess is not a free roll at all. There, the question is not whether you might be right but what a wrong answer costs you.
The habit worth building is stating your reasoning out loud before choosing. It exposes a weak assumption far more reliably than staring at the options again.