SSC CGL 2024 Tier-I · 23 September 2024, Shift 2 · General Intelligence and Reasoning · Question 8 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, ‘FLAKE’ is written as ‘&2348’ and ‘LAKES’ is written as ‘23@84’. How will ‘S’ be written in that language?

(a)4
(b)3
(c)&
(d)@

Answer

Why

Correct — D. Rule: compare the two words as sets, not letter by letter.

FLAKE and LAKES share L, A, K and E. FLAKE alone has F; LAKES alone has S.

Their code strings share 2, 3, 4 and 8. The character & belongs to FLAKE's code alone, and @ belongs to LAKES' code alone.

So & stands for F and @ stands for S — option (d).

Position proves nothing here. Read positionally, FLAKE makes K the code 4 while LAKES makes K the code @, and those two readings clash — the characters are jumbled, so only the set comparison is safe.

Why the others are wrong

(a)
4 — 4 is the last character of LAKES' code, which is where a positional reading lands. But 4 also appears in FLAKE's code, so it must belong to one of the shared letters L, A, K or E.
(b)
3 — 3 appears in both code strings. Anything common to both codes belongs to a letter common to both words, and S sits in LAKES only.
(c)
& — & appears in FLAKE's code and not in LAKES'. By the same set argument it stands for F, the letter FLAKE has and LAKES does not.

Concept

Substitution-code questions that hand you two overlapping words are solved by set difference, almost never by position.

List the letters each word has that the other lacks. List the code characters each string has that the other lacks. Those two short lists pair off one for one.

Here that is F against & and S against @. The block of four shared letters stays undecided, and it does not need deciding — you are asked for a letter that sits outside the overlap.

The code strings here are jumbled rather than aligned, so the third character need not encode the third letter. Testing one shared letter for a positional clash, as K does, settles that in seconds.

Key facts

FLAKE and LAKES differ by exactly one letter each, F on one side and S on the other.
Their code strings differ by exactly one character each, & on one side and @ on the other.
A character present in both code strings can only encode a letter present in both words.

Study next

Codes where each letter becomes its alphabet number, so a word turns into a digit stringThree-word substitution codes, solved by intersecting the shared lettersLetter-shift codes such as BAKE to FDMF, which are positional and do move letter by letter

Common traps

Matching code characters to letters by position.
Trying to pin down the four shared letters, which the data does not determine.
Assuming & must be the answer because it is the odd-looking character.

The same two-word set-difference format appears at 10 Sep 2024, 16:00, Reasoning Q.3 with VERY and VARY, and at 19 Sep 2024, 16:00, Reasoning Q.5 with PANTHER and ANOTHER.

Related PYQs

No directly related past PYQ was found.