SSC CGL 2024 Tier-I · 10 September 2024, Shift 1 · General Intelligence and Reasoning · Question 21 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 — B.

Rule: with the mirror vertical, at MN down the right-hand side, two things happen at once — the order of the characters reverses and every glyph is reflected left to right. Nothing turns upside down.

The stem reads y R e A 4 k L. Reversed, that is L k 4 A e R y.

Now reflect each one. The L keeps its upright stroke but the foot points left; the 4 opens the other way; the A is unaltered because it is symmetric about a vertical axis; k, e, R and y all face the other way.

Option (b) does both jobs — order reversed and every glyph reflected.

Why the others are wrong

(a)
The A is turned upside down and the R is left facing the way it does in the stem. A vertical mirror never inverts top to bottom and never leaves a character unreflected.
(c)
Six glyphs are reflected correctly and then the final y is flipped top to bottom instead of side to side, so its fork opens downward.
(d)
The order is reversed, but the L and the 4 are printed unreflected — they look exactly as they do in the stem, which cannot happen in a mirror.

Concept

A mirror placed vertically does two separate things, and both have to be checked.

The order reverses: the character nearest the mirror ends up nearest the viewer, so the last character of the stem becomes the first of the image.

Each glyph reflects left to right: 4 opens the other way, R becomes a backwards R, e becomes a backwards e. Capitals with a vertical axis of symmetry — A, H, I, M, O, T, U, V, W, X, Y — are unchanged.

Nothing rotates. A character that has been turned upside down belongs to a horizontal mirror, not this one.

The line MN is drawn to the right of the string and runs top to bottom, which is what makes this a left-right reflection. Had MN been drawn above or below the string, every character would invert instead.

Key facts

A vertical mirror reverses the order of the characters and reflects each one left to right.
Capital A, H, I, M, O, T, U, V, W, X and Y are unchanged by a left-right reflection.
An upside-down character is the signature of a horizontal mirror, not a vertical one.

Study next

Water-image items, where the mirror lies horizontally below the figureMirror images of figures built from arrows and shaded cells rather than textPaper-folding items, which apply the same reflection idea to a whole sheet

Common traps

Reversing the order and forgetting to reflect the individual characters
Reflecting the characters and forgetting to reverse the order
Treating a symmetric letter such as A as evidence that an option is correct

SSC draws the MN line beside the figure and offers four near-identical images, so here the decision comes down to one or two characters. The same item type appears at Reasoning Q.2 of this shift and on 10 Sep 2024, 12:30, Reasoning Q.8.

Related PYQs

No directly related past PYQ was found.