Ram goes North, turns right, then goes right again and then goes to left. In which direction Ram is now?

Question

UnlockIAS · Accepted Answer

Correct — A, EAST. Track the direction Ram faces, one instruction at a time, remembering that on the compass rose the cardinal points run clockwise North (0 degrees), East (90), South (180), West (270). Ram starts facing NORTH. A right turn is a quarter turn clockwise, so North becomes EAST. He goes right again, a second quarter turn clockwise, so East becomes SOUTH. He then goes to the left, a quarter turn anticlockwise, and from South that brings him back to EAST. Now do it the faster way as a check, because the step-by-step method is where candidates lose their place. Score a right turn as plus 90 degrees and a left turn as minus 90, and simply add: plus 90, plus 90, minus 90 gives plus 90 in total. Ram began at 0 degrees, which is North, so he ends at 90 degrees, which is East. The two methods agree, and the algebraic one has the advantage that it cannot be derailed by miscounting the sequence. One more thing is worth noticing about the wording, because it settles what is being asked: the stem supplies no distances at all, only turns. Nothing about Ram's position relative to his starting point can therefore be calculated, so 'in which direction Ram is now' can only mean the direction he is now heading. (If you did assume the four legs were of equal length, the net displacement would work out at two units due east of his starting point, so both readings land on East here — but only the heading reading is answerable from what the paper actually gives you.)

Why the other options are wrong — (b) This is exactly where Ram faces after the second right turn — North to East to South — and it is the answer of a candidate who stops one instruction early. The stem's phrasing invites it: 'turns right, then goes right again and then goes to left' packs three separate turns into one comma-spliced clause, and the last of the three is the one most easily read as part of the sentence's trailing-off rather than as a fresh instruction. Count the turns before you compute anything: there are three.  (c) The starting direction, and it is reached by a specific misreading rather than by carelessness: treating 'then goes right again' as continuing along the same eastward road rather than as a second turn. On that reading Ram faces East after one right turn, stays East, and then the final left takes him from East to North. It is also the answer of anyone who assumes that two rights and a left must roughly cancel out. They do not — the net is a single quarter turn clockwise.  (d) The mirror-image answer, produced by interchanging left and right. Score a right turn as anticlockwise and a left as clockwise and you get North to West to South to West. The same option also catches the candidate who gets only the last turn the wrong way round, since from South a clockwise turn gives West. Both versions of the error come from picturing the compass rose as something you stand in front of and look at, instead of something you are standing on and walking across.

Concept: Direction-sense questions are rotation problems wearing a walking costume. The apparatus is the compass rose: four cardinal points 90 degrees apart, running clockwise North at 0 degrees, East at 90, South at 180 and West at 270, with the four intercardinal points inserted between them at North-east 45, South-east 135, South-west 225 and North-west 315. A right turn is plus 90 degrees, a left turn is minus 90, an about-turn is 180, and every heading is taken modulo 360, so 405 degrees is simply 45. Two rules cover the whole family. First, turns are always measured from the walker's own current heading and never from the printed page — a person facing South has East on his left and West on his right, the exact reverse of how the page looks. Second, heading and displacement are different questions and need different data: the heading after any number of turns needs only the turns, while the displacement from the starting point needs the distances as well, obtained by adding the north-south legs and the east-west legs separately and, if the straight-line distance is wanted, applying Pythagoras to the two totals. A stem that gives no distances can only be asking about heading, and a stem that asks 'how far and in which direction from the start' must be giving them.

State PCS 2025 Q4 — Science & Technology PYQ with Answer

State PCS 2025 Q4 — Science & Technology PYQ with Answer