SSC CGL 2024 Tier-I · 11 September 2024, Shift 3 · General Intelligence and Reasoning · Question 1 of 100

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 6 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 Venn diagram that best illustrates the relationship between the following classes. Men, Engineers and Fathers

Answer

Why

Correct — A. Sort the three classes by what must be true of them.

Every father is a man, so the Fathers circle has to sit wholly inside the Men circle.

Engineers are not all men and not all fathers, yet some are both, so the Engineers circle must cut across the other two rather than sit inside or apart.

Option (a) draws exactly that: a small circle lying entirely within one large circle, with the second large circle overlapping both.

Why the others are wrong

(b)
Three separate circles say that no engineer is a man and no father is a man. A father is a man by definition, so total separation cannot be right.
(c)
A small circle inside a large one, plus a detached third circle. That third class touches nothing, but engineers and men do overlap, so no circle here may stand apart.
(d)
Two smaller circles sit side by side inside one big circle and never touch each other. That makes every engineer a man and denies that any father is an engineer.

Concept

A three-class Venn item asks for the one picture consistent with every relation among the classes, not merely a picture that is possible.

Test the pairs one at a time. Fathers and Men: a father is a male parent, so Fathers is a subset of Men and its circle goes inside.

Engineers and Men: some engineers are men and some are not, so those circles overlap partly. Engineers and Fathers: some engineers are fathers, so they overlap too.

Containment, partial overlap and separation are the only three pictures available, and each pair has to be assigned one of them.

The classes are everyday ones, so the deciding facts are definitional rather than factual: 'father' entails 'man', while 'engineer' entails neither.

Key facts

A class wholly contained in another is drawn as a circle inside a circle.
Two classes sharing only some members are drawn as two partly overlapping circles.
Fathers is a subset of Men, because a father is a male parent.
Engineers is not a subset of Men, so that circle can never sit wholly inside the Men circle.

Study next

Four-class Venn items, where one class sits inside the intersection of two othersReading a Venn diagram backwards: deciding which statements a given picture supportsSyllogism validity, which runs on the same containment and overlap tests

Common traps

Choosing a picture that is merely possible rather than the one that must hold
Drawing Engineers inside Men because the engineers you can picture happen to be men
Forgetting that Fathers, sitting inside Men, must also be cut by the Engineers circle

The classes are ordinary words, so the work is definitional and no outside knowledge is needed. The same containment-and-overlap reasoning decides the syllogism at Reasoning Q.12 of this shift, where three statements replace the picture.

Related PYQs

No directly related past PYQ was found.