The Sequence of folding a piece of paper and manner in which folded paper has…

In a paper-folding-and-cutting question, every cut made through the folded sheet passes through all the stacked layers at once. When the sheet is unfolded, each cut is therefore reflected once across every crease used to fold it — a cut away from a crease reappears as a mirrored pair across that crease, while a cut that falls exactly on a crease is not duplicated by that particular fold.

1. The sheet is folded along a vertical line, bringing one half onto the other.

2. The folded half is folded again along a further crease, producing the small rectangle shown as the final folded shape.

3. Two square holes are cut through this folded packet.

4. Undo the second fold first: each cut reflects across that crease.

5. Undo the first (vertical) fold: reflect the resulting pattern across the vertical mid-line.

6. Carrying both cuts through both reflections places a square at each of the two top corners, a square flanking each side of the centre, and one square sitting on the vertical crease at the bottom-centre (unduplicated because it lies on that fold line).

The unfolded sheet appears as:

This pattern is symmetric about the vertical mid-line only — matching the sheet's full-width vertical fold — while the bottom-centre square, lying on that very crease, correctly appears just once instead of twice.

Hence, the correct unfolded pattern is the one with two squares at the top corners, two squares flanking the centre, and a single square at the bottom-centre.