SSC CGL 2024 Tier-I · 19 September 2024, Shift 2 · General Intelligence and Reasoning · Question 23 of 99

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.

Each vowel in the word ‘ISOLATED’ is changed to the following letter in the English alphabetical order and each consonant is changed to the preceding letter in the English alphabetical order. How many letters are there in the English alphabetical order between the letter which is the third from the left end and the second from the left end in the group of letters thus formed?

(a)Three
(b)Four
(c)One
(d)Two

Answer

Why

Correct — C. Rule: vowels move forward one letter, consonants move back one letter.

ISOLATED, letter by letter:
I→J, S→R, O→P, L→K
A→B, T→S, E→F, D→C

The new group is JRPKBSFC.

Second from the left end is R, third from the left end is P. Between P(16) and R(18) stands only Q, so the answer is One — option (c).

Why the others are wrong

(a)
Three — Three is what you get by counting the letters inclusively — P, Q, R — instead of counting only what lies between them.
(b)
Four — Four needs two letters five apart, such as P and U, with Q, R, S and T between them. P and R are only two apart, so just one letter can stand between.
(d)
Two — Two counts one of the endpoints as well. Q alone lies between P and R, which makes the answer one.

Concept

Two separate things are being tested here, and the marks are usually lost on the second.

First the letter operation: the vowels of ISOLATED are I, O, A and E, each moving forward one place, while S, L, T and D each move back one. That produces JRPKBSFC.

Second, the reading of 'between': letters strictly between two letters exclude both endpoints. The stem also fixes which letters to compare — the second and third of the NEW group, not of the original word.

The order of the question is deliberately awkward: it names the third letter before the second, though the count between them is the same either way.

Key facts

The vowels in ISOLATED are I, O, A and E, and each moves forward one place.
ISOLATED becomes JRPKBSFC under this rule.
P is the 16th letter and R the 18th, so exactly one letter, Q, lies between them.

Study next

Vowel and consonant operations on a word, followed by a positional questionCounting strictly between two letters versus counting inclusivelyLetter-shift codes applied to whole words, as at Reasoning Q.12 of this shift

Common traps

Reading positions from ISOLATED instead of from the new group JRPKBSFC.
Counting the endpoints, which turns one into three.
Reversing the rule and moving consonants forward and vowels back.

The stem stacks a transformation on top of a positional count, so the second half is where the item is won. Reasoning Q.21 of this shift works the same alphabet arithmetic inside an analogy.

Related PYQs

No directly related past PYQ was found.