SSC CGL 2024 Tier-I · 13 September 2024, Shift 1 · General Intelligence and Reasoning · Question 15 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 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.

In a certain code language, ‘mountain stand tall’ is coded as ‘33 66 44’; ‘rocky is tall’ is coded as ‘44 55 11’ and ‘rocky is mountain’ is coded as ‘33 55 11’. How is ‘stand’ coded in that language?

(a)33
(b)11
(c)44
(d)66

Answer

Why

Correct — D. Solve by elimination between the statements; the digits themselves encode nothing.

'rocky is tall' = 44 55 11 and 'rocky is mountain' = 33 55 11 share the words rocky and is, so they share the codes 55 and 11.

What is left over must pair off: tall = 44 and mountain = 33.

Now read the first statement. 'mountain stand tall' = 33 66 44 uses 33 for mountain and 44 for tall, so the code left for stand is 66 → option (d).

Why the others are wrong

(a)
33 — Option (a) offers 33, which the second and third statements pin to mountain. Mountain already appears in the first statement, so 33 is spoken for before stand is reached.
(b)
11 — Option (b) offers 11, one of the two codes common to 'rocky is tall' and 'rocky is mountain'. It therefore belongs to rocky or to is, and neither word appears in the first statement.
(c)
44 — Option (c) offers 44, the code for tall. Tall stands beside stand in the first statement, so 44 is already used there.

Concept

This is a substitution code: each word maps to one code token, and the token's digits carry no information about the word's length or letters. Looking for alphabet positions here wastes the minute.

The whole technique is set intersection. Two statements sharing a word must share its code; two sharing two words must share both. Cancel the repeated words, and the survivors on each side are forced to pair with each other.

You often do not need every word solved. Here rocky and is are never separated, and the question never asks you to.

Codes in these items are deliberately printed in a scrambled order, so a word's position in the sentence tells you nothing about which token is its own.

Key facts

Statements 2 and 3 share rocky and is, and share the codes 55 and 11.
Their unshared words force tall = 44 and mountain = 33.
Statement 1 then leaves 66 as the only code available for stand.
Which of 55 and 11 belongs to rocky is never determined, and never needed.

Study next

Word-substitution codes needing a fourth statement to isolate one wordLetter-shift codes, where the digits really do encode alphabet positions

Common traps

Deriving a code from the word's letter count or alphabet positions.
Assuming the codes are listed in the same order as the words — that shortcut happens to give 66 here, but it contradicts statements 2 and 3.
Spending time deciding which of 55 and 11 is rocky, which the question does not require.

The three-statement numeric word code recurs in CGL 2024 Tier-I. 'she is girl' = 7 3 9 is set at 18 Sep 2024, 9:00, Reasoning Q.11.

SSC also runs a two-statement version with letter-pair tokens, such as 'talk to me' = aq yt bl at 12 Sep 2024, 12:30, Reasoning Q.15.

Related PYQs

No directly related past PYQ was found.