SSC CGL 2024 Tier-I · 24 September 2024, Shift 3 · General Intelligence and Reasoning · Question 25 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 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.

Select the correct mirror image of the given figure when the mirror is placed at MN.

Answer

Why

Correct — D. MN is a vertical line drawn to the right of the string, so the reflection does two things at once.

Rule: the order of the characters reverses, and each character is itself turned left-to-right.

Cw4t2da therefore reflects, reading outward from the mirror, as a reversed a, a reversed d, a reversed 2, a reversed t, a reversed 4, then w, then a reversed C. The w is symmetric about a vertical line, so it is the one character that looks unaltered.

Flip option (d) back over and it reads Cw4t2da exactly. No other option does.

Why the others are wrong

(a)
Its t and 2 are printed the original way round and in their original order. A mirror has to turn both characters and put the 2 before the t.
(b)
Its d and 4 have not been turned. A reversed d takes the shape of a b, and a reversed 4 opens the other way.
(c)
Its w has become an M and its t is upside down — that is a top-to-bottom flip. A mirror standing on a vertical line never turns a character over.

Concept

A mirror placed along a vertical line reflects sideways, and only sideways.

That has two consequences, and a distractor is usually built by breaking exactly one of them. First the string reverses, because the character nearest the mirror stays nearest it in the image. Second each character is reversed on itself, left to right, while its top stays its top.

The fast check in the hall is to test one end and one middle character rather than all seven: the C must finish at the far end of the image and must open the other way.

All four options carry the same seven characters, so the item is settled entirely by their order and by which way each one faces. Reading the string as a word is no help at all.

Key facts

A mirror on a vertical line reverses the order of a string and reverses each character left to right.
The character nearest the mirror remains nearest the mirror in the image.
w is symmetric about a vertical line, so a vertical mirror leaves it looking unchanged.
Turning w upside down gives M, which is a rotation and not a reflection.

Study next

Characters unchanged by a vertical mirror: A, H, I, M, O, T, U, V, W, X, Y and 0, 8Water images, where the mirror is horizontal and the order of the string stays putMirror items with MN drawn on the left of the figure instead of the right

Common traps

Reversing the order but leaving the individual characters facing their original way
Turning a character upside down, w into M, instead of side to side

SSC draws MN beside the figure and expects you to check whether it is vertical or horizontal before anything else. The same instruction opens this paper at Reasoning Q.1.

Related PYQs

No directly related past PYQ was found.