Mukesh said to his friend, “Rita is the mother of my son’s wife’s daughter”. How is Mukesh related to Rita?

Question

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Correct — D, Father-in-law. Fix the viewpoint first: Mukesh is the speaker, so every 'my' in the sentence is his. Now build the chain outward, one link at a time. 'My son' is Mukesh's son. 'My son's wife' is the woman his son married — Mukesh's daughter-in-law. 'My son's wife's daughter' is that woman's daughter, a girl one generation further down. The sentence then says Rita is the mother of that girl. But the girl has already been defined as the son's wife's daughter, and the mother of a woman's daughter is that woman herself: the chain folds straight back on itself. Rita is therefore the son's wife — Mukesh's daughter-in-law. The question asks for the relation in the other direction, how Mukesh stands to Rita, and the father of a woman's husband is her father-in-law. Mukesh is Rita's father-in-law, option (d). Two things make this airtight rather than merely probable. First, the fold is definitional and not an assumption: even if that granddaughter were not Mukesh's son's own child, the sentence names her as the son's wife's daughter, so her mother is the son's wife whatever else is true. Second, no fact outside the sentence is needed — no ages, no other marriages, no second child. One sentence, four links, and the last link cancels the third.

Why the other options are wrong — (a) The trap the question is actually built around, and the one that catches good candidates. It comes from compressing 'my son's wife's daughter' into 'my granddaughter' and then reasoning that the mother of your granddaughter is your daughter. That is true only for a grandchild through your daughter. For a grandchild through your son the mother is your daughter-in-law, and the stem says son. Mukesh could be Rita's father only if Rita had been born to him, whereas every link after 'my son' in this sentence passes through a marriage.  (b) This is the right kind of relation pointed the wrong way. Mukesh could be Rita's son-in-law only if he had married Rita's daughter, which would put him one generation below her; the chain puts him one generation above. The usual route to this answer is answering the wrong direction — the chain naturally yields 'Rita is the daughter-in-law', and a candidate who has that in mind, cannot find 'daughter-in-law' among the four options, and grabs the only other in-law word on the list ends up here.  (c) Mukesh could be Rita's son only if Rita were his mother, which would put her a generation above him. The sentence places her a generation below: she is married to his son. This option is worth using as a free structural check rather than as a serious candidate — 'son' and 'son-in-law' both put Mukesh in the younger generation, so both are eliminated the moment you know Rita is the son's wife, before you decide anything about blood or marriage.

Concept: Blood-relation items are solved by turning a sentence into a chain of directed links and then reading a two- or three-generation tree. Three habits settle almost all of them. First, fix whose viewpoint the possessives belong to: relations stated in quoted speech belong to the speaker, so 'my son' here is Mukesh's son and not his friend's. Second, know the self-folding phrases, because they are the whole trick in one-line items. 'The mother of X's daughter' is X, when X is female; 'the only daughter of my mother' is the female speaker herself; 'my father's only son' is the male speaker himself. Any chain of the form 'the parent of P's child' collapses back to P, so a phrase that appears three links deep is often one link deep. Third, separate ties by birth from ties by marriage. Son, daughter, brother, sister, father and mother are ties of birth; every 'in-law' is a tie of marriage, and each in-law label has a mirror image, so father-in-law and daughter-in-law describe one marriage viewed from opposite ends. Because the mirror exists, the last step of any blood-relation answer must be to check which end the question asked about. 'How is X related to Y' wants the word that describes X.

State PCS 2025 Q3 — Science & Technology PYQ with Answer

State PCS 2025 Q3 — Science & Technology PYQ with Answer