Every item gives you two numbers: your aircraft's heading and the bearing to a beacon or landmark. From those alone you have to work out where that point actually sits relative to your nose — ahead, behind, off to the left, off to the right — without ever seeing a map. The arithmetic is trivial (relative bearing = bearing minus heading); doing it fast, under pressure, and without drawing it out on paper is the actual skill.
Why airlines test it
Pilots operate constantly inside a frame of reference that isn't the one printed on the map. The aircraft's heading rotates independently of where everything else is — the destination, a holding beacon, another aircraft's position report — and losing track of that relationship is a genuine source of disorientation, not just an inconvenience. Airlines test this because a pilot who has to stop and physically re-derive 'where is that thing relative to me' every time the heading changes is too slow for a task that has to run continuously, largely unconsciously, for the whole flight.
In the cockpit
This is the skill behind holding your mental picture of the world outside relative to wherever the nose happens to be pointing right now. ATC gives traffic as a clock position off your heading, not as a compass bearing; a VOR radial only becomes useful once you have rotated it into where that line actually is relative to you; and in the circuit, or in cloud, working out where the field is from your current position and heading is a continuous background task, not one you get to pause and think through.
For example: you are flying heading 310° and ATC calls traffic at your 2 o'clock — you convert that instantly to a bearing of about 010° (310 plus 60, wrapping past 360) and start scanning the right piece of sky without needing to think about it twice. A few minutes later you pick up a bearing of 220° to your destination beacon; on a heading of 310°, that is roughly 90° left of the nose — the beacon is off your left wingtip, not somewhere ahead, and you turn accordingly rather than searching the windscreen for it.
How to practise
Spatial Orientation gives you two presentations of the same underlying judgement. Start on the plan view, where the geometry is drawn on a north-up map in front of you — use it to build an accurate mental model of what 'beacon is behind and to the left' actually looks like, rather than to read the answer straight off the picture. Once that model is solid, switch to instruments only, where you get nothing but a heading indicator and a bearing pointer and have to do the heading-plus-bearing rotation entirely in your head — that is the format the real assessments use, and the one worth being fast at.
The Air France cadet pre-selection asks the orientation question from a photograph in ENAC Viewpoint Finder: a group of solids on flat ground under a single light, a plan of the same group with eight positions around it, and one answer, the position the photograph was taken from. The shadows, which of two solids stands on the left, and what is hidden behind something else settle it, in that order. The Air France course sets it in its stage.