SSC CGL 2024 Tier-I · 25 September 2024, Shift 2 · General Intelligence and Reasoning · Question 21 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 as shown below.

Answer

Why

Correct — C. The figure prints the string b a m P 3 2 with the mirror line MN standing upright to its right.

A vertical mirror does two things at once. It reverses the reading order, so the character nearest the mirror comes out first, and it flips every character laterally.

Reversed order: 2, 3, P, m, a, b. Each glyph must then appear back to front - the 2 opening the other way, the 3 with its bulges on the left, the P with its bowl on the left, and the b reading as a d shape.

Option (c) does both: the order is reversed and every character is laterally inverted.

Why the others are wrong

(a)
Option (a) reverses the order and flips every glyph except the last, which prints as a normal b. The mirror image of b has to read as a d shape.
(b)
Option (b) reverses the order but leaves the P and the 3 unflipped, both standing exactly as they do in the original. A mirror cannot leave them alone.
(d)
Option (d) opens with a normal 2, so the character standing closest to the mirror is the one glyph it fails to flip.

Concept

A mirror at MN down the right-hand side gives a left-to-right reflection, and candidates lose it by doing half the job.

Half one is order. Whatever stood nearest the mirror stands first in the image, so b a m P 3 2 comes back as 2 3 P m a b.

Half two is shape. Every letter and digit is itself reversed, and only characters symmetric about a vertical axis survive unchanged. None of b, a, m, P, 3 or 2 is one of those.

Each wrong option is right about most of the strip and wrong about one or two characters, so compare the options against each other character by character rather than picturing the whole strip at once.

Key facts

A mirror placed upright to the right reverses the reading order and flips each character left to right.
The printed string is b a m P 3 2, so the image opens with a reversed 2 and closes with the mirror of b.
Among capitals, A, H, I, M, O, T, U, V, W, X and Y are unchanged by a vertical mirror, and among digits 0 and 8.

Study next

Mirror images of alphanumeric strings at a vertical mirrorWater images, where the mirror is horizontal and the flip is top to bottomWhich letters and digits are symmetric about a vertical axis

Common traps

Reversing the order but drawing the characters the right way round
Flipping each character but keeping the original left-to-right order
Treating b as if it mirrors into itself rather than into a d shape

Mirror-at-MN items run right through the 2024 papers — 43 of them across the 35 shifts.

Another stands at Reasoning Q.3 of this shift, and further examples are at 09 Sep 2024, 09:00, Reasoning Q.10 and Q.13.

Related PYQs

No directly related past PYQ was found.