Problem number 16. The pictures below show the front and back of an object built from colored cubes. The object is broken into three pieces. Two of the pieces are shown below. Which of these is the third piece? To solve this problem we can notice what the picture looks like from the front and the back and use that to determine what the object looks like. From the front picture we see that the white object has one block in the first row and it has two blocks next to it because the stack behind the first block is one block higher. Similarly we can see that in the back view there is one block in the last row when there are two blocks next to it. This gives us a good idea of what the white block looks like. Now let's figure out which of the options corresponds to that. In picture A we see that there are two blocks in the first row and then behind it there is one block. This matches the back picture but it does not match the front picture so this cannot be the object. In B we see that there is one block then one block then two blocks. This does not match either the front or the back so it cannot be B. Similarly in C the object is flat one block across but we see that in the picture there is a height of two somewhere in the object so it cannot be C. D matches all the descriptions so far. It has one block in the first row then two in the second and then one in the third. We'll see that it also looks very similar to the second yellow block and that's because these two have nearly the same front and back pictures so D is a good candidate. Finally for E we see that we have the pattern 2 1 2 which is the opposite of what we want because we only want one block in the first row not two so that means it cannot be E. Therefore the best option that we see so far is block D and that means that the answer is D.

missing piece

colored cubes

front and back views

block arrangement

option D