The position of how many letters will remain unchanged if each of the letters in the word ‘JEALOUS’ is arranged in the English alphabetical order?

Correct — D. Rule: write the word, write it sorted, then compare position by position.

JEALOUS as given: J, E, A, L, O, U, S.
Sorted alphabetically: A, E, J, L, O, S, U.

Position 2 holds E in both rows. Position 4 holds L in both. Position 5 holds O in both.

J, A, U and S all move. So three positions are unchanged, which is option (d).

Why the others are wrong

• (a)
  Four — Four is one too many. Only E, L and O hold their slots. Adding S to the list is the usual slip: S is 7th in JEALOUS but 6th once the word is sorted, so it moves.
• (b)
  One — One counts the middle letter L and stops. E at position 2 and O at position 5 also survive the sort, and they are easy to miss because every letter around them moves.
• (c)
  Two — Two lands if you spot E and L and stop reading. O at position 5 is unchanged as well, which takes the count to three.

This is a positional-invariance count, not a test of the alphabet.

Write the word with a number under each letter, write the sorted word directly beneath it, then read down the columns. Every column where the two rows agree is one you are counting.

The sort is fully determined, so two positions come free: the alphabetically smallest letter always ends up first and the largest always ends up last. Settling those two before anything else fixes both ends of the word in seconds.

Key facts

• JEALOUS sorted into alphabetical order is AEJLOSU.
• In JEALOUS the letters E, L and O keep their original positions.
• The alphabetically smallest letter of a word always moves to position 1 after sorting.

Common traps

• Answering the complement, the number of letters that moved, when the question asks for the ones that stayed
• Sorting by eye without writing position numbers under both rows
• Matching the sorted row from the wrong end, so position 1 is compared against position 7

No directly related past PYQ was found.