BPSC 70th CCE Re-exam Prelims General Studies · Question 97 of 142

Correct — D, UQSERA. Extract the rule from the pair you are given before touching the options. Number the letters of CIRCLE: C(1) I(2) R(3) C(4) L(5) E(6). Now read RICELC against those numbers: R is the letter from position 3, I from 2, C from 1, E from 6, L from 5, C from 4. The output is therefore the input taken in the order 3, 2, 1, 6, 5, 4 — the first three letters reversed among themselves, and the last three reversed among themselves. The same operation stated more simply: cut the word in half, CIR and CLE, and reverse each half separately, giving RIC and ELC, which joined is RICELC. Both descriptions are worth having, because agreeing with each other is a check that you have read the example correctly. There is a further check hidden in this particular word: CIRCLE has a C at positions 1 and 4, and RICELC has a C at positions 3 and 6, which is exactly where the rule sends them. Now apply it to SQUARE: S(1) Q(2) U(3) A(4) R(5) E(6). Taking positions 3, 2, 1, 6, 5, 4 gives U, Q, S, E, R, A — UQSERA. By the halves method, SQU and ARE reverse to UQS and ERA, joined as UQSERA. That is option (d), and the two routes agree. What makes the question worth its mark is that the other three options are each a near-miss produced by getting one part of the operation right and one part wrong, so a candidate who has half-derived the rule will still find something on the list that looks familiar.

• (a)ERAUQS — SQUARE written backwards. This is the single most common wrong answer in letter-analogy questions, because full reversal is the first transformation anyone tests and it superficially resembles what happened to CIRCLE. It fails the demonstrated rule: reversing CIRCLE whole gives ELCRIC, not RICELC. Notice too that ERAUQS is UQSERA with its two halves swapped, so a candidate who derives the right answer but then writes the halves in the wrong order lands here.
• (b)AREUQS — Moves the second half, ARE, to the front unchanged and puts the reversed first half, UQS, behind it. Two operations are muddled together — swapping the halves, and reversing only one of them. The demonstrated rule does neither: it keeps the halves in their original order and reverses each of them in place. Applied to CIRCLE this option's rule would give CLERIC, which is not what the stem shows.
• (c)UQSARE — Reverses the first half correctly to UQS but leaves ARE untouched. It is the answer of someone who spotted half the rule and stopped, and it is the most dangerous option here because its opening three letters are identical to the correct answer's. Applied to CIRCLE it would give RICCLE, which does not match the demonstrated output — the tell is the last three letters, which must be reversed as well.

A verbal analogy of the form 'A is to B as C is to ?' is a two-step task, and almost all the marks are lost in the first step. Step one is to infer the transformation from the pair you are given; step two is to apply it. Because a single example is consistent with more than one rule in principle, the reliable method is positional: write the source word with its letter positions, write the target under it, and record where each output letter came from. That produces a permutation — here 3, 2, 1, 6, 5, 4 — which is unambiguous and can be applied mechanically. The transformations examiners actually use on six-letter words are a small family, and it is worth being able to recognise all of them: whole-word reversal, reversal of each half in place, swapping the halves without reversal, swapping adjacent pairs, a constant alphabetical shift such as +3, an alternating shift such as +2 then −2, and replacement of each letter by its opposite in the alphabet, where A pairs with Z and B with Y. This paper's option list is essentially a menu of the first three of those, which is why extracting the exact permutation, rather than the general flavour, is what decides the question.

Under negative marking this is one of the few questions where certainty is available at no extra cost, because the answer can be verified rather than merely chosen. Derive the rule, apply it, and then run it backwards: take your answer, undo the operation, and check that you recover SQUARE. UQSERA taken as UQS and ERA reverses to SQU and ARE, which is SQUARE — so the answer is proved rather than preferred. That backward check takes a few seconds and it catches the two most likely slips, which are reversing the whole word and reversing only one half. A second discipline is to test your candidate rule against the given pair before applying it, and to reject any rule that does not reproduce RICELC exactly. Both option (b) and option (c) correspond to rules that fail that test — they would turn CIRCLE into CLERIC and RICCLE respectively — so a candidate who checks backwards can eliminate them without even looking at SQUARE. Reasoning items like this one carry the same one mark as a question on Article 253 or on the Maikal range, and they are the only marks on the paper that depend on no prior knowledge at all.

• The demonstrated rule as a permutation: output = input letters taken in the order 3, 2, 1, 6, 5, 4 — verified on CIRCLE, where R-I-C-E-L-C are the letters at those positions.
• The same rule stated as a procedure: split the six-letter word into two halves and reverse each half in place — CIR|CLE becomes RIC|ELC.
• Applied to SQUARE: SQU|ARE becomes UQS|ERA = UQSERA, and reversing each half of UQSERA recovers SQUARE, which proves the answer.
• Whole-word reversal, the commonest wrong rule, would turn CIRCLE into ELCRIC — not the output the stem shows — and SQUARE into ERAUQS, which is option (a).
• Options (b) and (c) correspond to rules that would turn CIRCLE into CLERIC and RICCLE respectively, so both can be eliminated by testing them against the given pair before applying them.

• Reversing the whole word. It is the reflex answer and it is offered here as option (a), but it does not reproduce RICELC from CIRCLE.
• Stopping after the first half. Option (c) reverses SQU to UQS and leaves ARE alone; its first three letters match the correct answer, which is exactly why it catches people.
• Adopting a rule without testing it on the given pair. Every wrong option here corresponds to a rule that fails that test, so the test alone is worth three eliminations.

BPSC scatters reasoning through the General Studies paper rather than blocking it together — this re-examination of January 2025 sets a number series at Q3, a count-the-triangles figure at Q10, an odd-pair item at Q65, this letter analogy, and a Venn-diagram question at Q139 — and each is worth exactly the same mark as a question on the Constitution. UPSC moved reasoning out of General Studies when the CSAT became Paper II in 2011, so its examples on this pattern are older, but the item types are identical, as its 1998 shift-code question shows.

• practice — not a real PYQ

  BASKET is related to SABTEK in the same way PENCIL is related to

  • (a)LICNEP
  • (b)NEPLIC
  • (c)LICPEN
  • (d)NEPCIL

  Answer(b) NEPLIC — the rule is to split the word into halves and reverse each half in place: BAS|KET becomes SAB|TEK, so PEN|CIL becomes NEP|LIC.

• practice — not a real PYQ

  In a certain code, LONDON is written as NODNOL. How will PARIS be written in the same code ?

  • (a)SIRAP
  • (b)RAPIS
  • (c)SIRPA
  • (d)ISRAP

  Answer(a) SIRAP — here the rule really is whole-word reversal, since NODNOL is LONDON written backwards, and PARIS reversed is SIRAP. Contrast this with the half-reversal rule in the question above.