SSC CGL 2024 Tier-I · 13 September 2024, Shift 3 · General Intelligence and Reasoning · Question 19 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 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 correct mirror image of the given figure when the mirror is placed at MN as shown below.

Answer

Why

Correct — B. MN is a vertical line, so the mirror reverses the row left to right and laterally inverts each character. Nothing turns upside down.

Rule: reverse the order, then flip each character side to side.

The row reads 5 P 6 q 7, so the image reads 7, q, 6, P, 5 from left to right.

Option (b) carries all five: the 7 keeps its bar on top with the stroke now falling to the right, the q becomes a p, the 6 keeps its loop at the bottom with the tail curling right, the P has its bowl on the left of the stem, and the 5 has its bowl swung to the left.

Why the others are wrong

(a)
Its 7 is upside down — the bar sits along the bottom. A vertical mirror never moves a bar from the top to the bottom, and the other four characters here are inverted correctly.
(c)
Its P is not inverted: the stem is still on the left and the bowl still on the upper right, exactly as in the printed row.
(d)
Its 5 is not inverted: the top bar still runs from the left and the bowl still sits on the right. Everything else in it is correct.

Concept

A mirror standing on a vertical line, as MN does here, produces a lateral inversion. Two things happen at once and candidates usually do only one of them.

First the sequence reverses, because the character nearest the mirror stays nearest the mirror in the image. So 7 comes first and 5 comes last.

Second, each character is flipped about its own vertical axis. Left and right swap. Top and bottom do not move — that single test is what separates a mirror image from a rotation.

In a mixed row the strongly asymmetric characters decide it fastest. Here 5, 7 and P each change visibly under a lateral flip, and each of the three wrong options fails on exactly one of them.

Key facts

A vertical mirror line swaps left and right and leaves top and bottom untouched.
The order of the characters reverses, so the character last in the row appears first in the image.
A character whose bar or loop has moved from the top to the bottom has been rotated, not mirrored.

Study next

Water images, where a horizontal mirror flips top and bottom insteadCharacters unchanged by a vertical mirror, such as A, H, M, O, T, U and 8Mirror images of clock faces and of figures carrying an internal pattern

Common traps

Rotating the row through 180 degrees instead of flipping it, which drops bars to the bottom.
Reversing the order but leaving the characters themselves unflipped.
Flipping every character correctly but keeping them in the printed order.

The mirror line is drawn and labelled MN, so the axis is never in doubt — the mark turns on whether every character was inverted, not just the obvious ones. The same MN framing is used at 10 Sep 2024, 09:00, Reasoning Q.2 and at 10 Sep 2024, 12:30, Reasoning Q.8.

Related PYQs

No directly related past PYQ was found.