SSC CGL 2024 Tier-I · 25 September 2024, Shift 2 · 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.

In a certain code language, ‘DRAPE’ is coded as ‘65432’ and ‘TAPED’ is coded as ‘24596’. What is the code for ‘R’ in that language?

(a)9
(b)6
(c)2
(d)3

Answer

Why

Correct — D. The digits are not assigned letter by letter in position, so compare the two words as sets.

DRAPE and TAPED share D, A, P and E. R belongs to DRAPE alone, and T to TAPED alone.

Their codes 65432 and 24596 share 6, 4, 5 and 2. 3 appears only in DRAPE's code, and 9 only in TAPED's.

The letter unique to DRAPE must take the digit unique to DRAPE's code, so R = 3 -> option (d).

Why the others are wrong

(a)
9 — 9 is the digit found only in TAPED's code, so it belongs to T, the letter found only in TAPED.
(b)
6 — 6 appears in both codes, so it must stand for one of the four shared letters. R appears in DRAPE only.
(c)
2 — 2 likewise appears in both codes, which rules it out for R on exactly the same test.

Concept

When two coded words overlap, solve them by elimination on the sets, not by lining the digits up under the letters.

A positional reading collapses here immediately: DRAPE would make P = 3 and E = 2, while TAPED would make P = 5 and E = 9. The digits have been scrambled deliberately.

What survives scrambling is membership. A letter present in only one of the two words must be coded by a digit present in only that word's code, and that single pairing is all the question asks for.

The four shared letters cannot be pinned from this data at all - D, A, P and E hold the digits 6, 4, 5 and 2 in an order the question never fixes. Only R and T are decidable.

Key facts

DRAPE and TAPED are the same five letters except that one has R and the other T.
Their codes 65432 and 24596 differ by exactly one digit each, 3 and 9.
The letter unique to a word takes the digit unique to that word's code, so R = 3 and T = 9.

Study next

Letter-to-digit codes solved by intersecting the two coded wordsPositional against non-positional coding, and how to tell which you haveCodes where the number is computed from letter positions rather than assigned

Common traps

Lining the digits up positionally, which hands P two different codes
Answering 9, the digit that belongs to T
Trying to fix D, A, P and E individually when the data cannot settle them

This intersection item recurs with different word pairs - TIDE and DENT for N at 17 Sep 2024, 12:30, Reasoning Q.8 (keyed 3), DRIVE and RIDES for V at 18 Sep 2024, 09:00, Reasoning Q.9 (keyed 9), and BREAK and BROKE for A at 25 Sep 2024, 16:00, Reasoning Q.23 (keyed 2).

Related PYQs

No directly related past PYQ was found.