1. A thermometer is left outside on a frosty morning. What does it read?
ICAS Science Paper B (Year 4)
Paper B is sat by Year 4 students. Thirty questions, four options each, 45 minutes.
Like every ICAS Science paper, it tests scientific skills rather than recalled content. Questions hand you an experiment or a set of observations and ask what follows from them.
Last updated: 5 October 2026
What Year 4 adds: the fair test
This is the level where fair testing becomes a regular question type, and it is worth more marks than any single topic.
The idea sounds simple — change one thing, keep everything else the same — and Year 4 students can usually recite it. The paper asks it in the form that catches them: here are two set-ups, why is this comparison unfair? Or: which of these four changes would spoil the test?
Answering needs the child to look at the whole picture and find the difference that matters, which is a genuinely harder task than stating the rule.
What else shows up
Year 4 content provides the settings — life cycles and habitats, natural and processed materials, contact and non-contact forces, changes to the landscape. But the questions are about the reasoning, not the topic. A question set in a habitat is really an interpreting question wearing a habitat costume.
Where Year 4 students lose marks
- Fair test questions, per above — the rule is known, the application is not
- Tables with two variables, where the answer needs both columns read together rather than one looked up
- "Which conclusion is supported", where three of the four options are true statements about the world but are not what this data shows
That last one is the classic ICAS Science trap and it starts here.
What the mark will look like
ICAS marks run lower than school tests by design. The paper keeps stretching students well past year level, so a result that looks disappointing on a school scale can be a strong ICAS result — read it against the distribution rather than as a percentage.
How to prepare for Paper B
Do one real experiment at home and deliberately break it — change two things at once, then ask your child why you can no longer tell what caused what. Five minutes of that is worth more than an hour of revision.
Common questions
Which year level sits ICAS Paper B?
Year 4. ICAS names its papers by letter rather than by year — Paper A is Year 3 and Paper F is Year 8 — so a Year 4 student sits Paper B.
How long is Science Paper B?
30 questions in 45 minutes.
What is a fair test question?
One that asks why an experiment can no longer tell you what caused what — usually because more than one thing was changed at the same time.
Year 4 also sits: Maths Paper B · English Paper B · Spelling Paper B
Sample questions
Try each one first, then open the answer and worked solution under it.
Answer and worked solution
Correct answer: B
This scale runs from −20 at the bottom up to 40, with a mark every 10 °C.
The liquid stops one mark below the zero line.
One mark below zero on this scale is −10 °C.
The thermometer reads −10 °C.
2. Ali rolled a red car down a ramp once and a blue car down the same ramp once. The red car went further, and Ali says the red car is the faster car. What should he do before saying that?
Answer and worked solution
Correct answer: A
A single roll can turn out well or badly for reasons that have nothing to do with the car.
One car may have been let go a little straighter, or caught a bump the other missed.
Rolling each car several times shows whether the red car really does go further most of the time.
Ali should roll each car several times before comparing the results.
3. Zara gives plant food to ten seedlings, waters them for three weeks, and finds that all ten have grown taller. She concludes that the plant food made them grow. What does her investigation still need before that conclusion holds?
Answer and worked solution
Correct answer: D
Seedlings grow taller over three weeks whether or not they are fed, so growing is not by itself evidence about the food.
To credit the food, she needs to know what would have happened without it.
That means a matching group grown the same way but unfed, so the two can be set side by side.
She needs a matching unfed group, because seedlings grow anyway over three weeks.
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Related papers: Science Paper A (Year 3) · Science Paper C (Year 5)
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