SSC CGL 2024 Tier-I · 10 September 2024, Shift 1 · General Intelligence and Reasoning · Question 2 of 98

Text as printed on a candidate's response sheet for this shift; answer per SSC's tentative key as marked on that sheet. Solution last reviewed 10 September 2026.

Where this paper and its answers come from

SSC does not publish CGL question papers or a public answer key. The questions and options here are reproduced as printed on a candidate's own response sheet for this shift — the Commission's text, unchanged. Each answer is SSC's tentative key as marked on that sheet; SSC allowed challenges to it and never publishes a final key. The solutions are written by UnlockIAS.

Select the correct mirror image of the given figure when the mirror is placed at MN as shown below.

Answer

Why

Correct — C.

Rule: a mirror standing at the vertical line MN flips left to right. Two things change at once — the reading order of the strip reverses, and every single character is reversed about a vertical axis.

The strip reads u P 2 3 A B, so the reflection must read B A 3 2 P u, with each glyph turned.

B becomes a backwards B, A is unchanged, 3 becomes an E-like shape, 2 becomes a reversed 2, P becomes a bowl-on-the-left P, and u is unchanged. Option (c) is the strip that shows exactly that.

Why the others are wrong

(a)
Its last glyph is n, which is u turned upside down — a water image, not a mirror image. Its 2 and 3 also stay in their original order and their normal shapes.
(b)
It opens with an upright B and follows it with an upside-down A. A left-right mirror reverses B and leaves A untouched, so both of those glyphs are wrong.
(d)
Everything is right except the fourth glyph: the 2 is printed the normal way round. In the mirror the 2 has to reverse like every other character in the strip.

Concept

A mirror placed along a vertical line MN gives a left-right reversal, and it acts on two levels at once.

The order of the characters reverses, and each character is separately reflected about a vertical axis.

Characters symmetric about a vertical axis come through unchanged: A, H, I, M, O, T, U, V, W, X, Y and the digits 0 and 8. Everything else is redrawn.

The rival transformation, a water image, comes from a mirror lying horizontally. There the reading order stays and each character flips top to bottom, which is exactly what turns u into n.

The four options here differ by one or two glyphs, not by the whole strip, so the fast route is to pick a single asymmetric character and check it in all four rather than reading each option end to end.

Key facts

A vertical mirror reverses the order of the characters and the shape of each character.
A, H, I, M, O, T, U, V, W, X and Y survive a vertical mirror unchanged because each is symmetric about a vertical axis.
A water image keeps the reading order and flips each character top to bottom, which is what separates it from a mirror image.

Study next

Water images and the single test that separates them from mirror imagesMirror images with the mirror line drawn at the top or the bottom of the figureWhich capital letters and digits are symmetric about a vertical axis

Common traps

Reversing the order of the characters but leaving the characters themselves unturned.
Solving it as a water image when the line MN is drawn vertically.

SSC prints the strip, draws the mirror line MN beside it, and offers four near-identical reflections. Also asked 9 Sep 2024, 09:00, Reasoning Q.10 and 9 Sep 2024, 12:30, Reasoning Q.2.

Related PYQs

No directly related past PYQ was found.