SSC CGL 2024 Tier-I · 25 September 2024, Shift 2 · General Intelligence and Reasoning · Question 3 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.

Answer

Why

Correct — A. A mirror held along the vertical line MN does two things at once, and the answer has to show both.

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

Order first. Read 72501 back from the mirror and it becomes 1, 0, 5, 2, 7.

Then the glyphs. In option (a) the 1 carries its flag on the far side, the 5 and the 2 are printed back to front, and the 7's shoulder runs the other way. The 0 looks untouched because it is symmetric about a vertical axis — expected, not an error.

Why the others are wrong

(b)
The digits are in the right reversed order, 1 0 5 2 7, but every glyph is printed the normal way round, so nothing has actually met the mirror.
(c)
Only the leading 1 is flipped. The 0, 5, 2 and 7 keep their ordinary shapes, so four of the five glyphs are untouched.
(d)
Here only the 5 is reversed while the 1, 0, 2 and 7 stand normally. A reflection acts on every glyph in the strip, not on a chosen one.

Concept

A lateral mirror — one placed along a vertical line — reverses left and right and leaves top and bottom alone. On a row of characters that shows up twice: the sequence runs backwards, and each glyph is individually reversed.

Candidates lose this item by doing only the first. Digits that are symmetric about a vertical axis, such as 0 and 8, look unchanged after the flip, which is why they get planted in these strips: they make a half-done answer look right.

MN is drawn to the right of the figure here, but the side the mirror sits on does not change the image — only the axis it lies along does.

Key facts

A vertical mirror reverses left and right only, leaving top and bottom untouched.
A water image is the horizontal-mirror version, reversing top and bottom instead.
Under a vertical mirror the reading order of a string reverses and each character is also flipped.
0 and 8 are symmetric about a vertical axis, so they look identical in a lateral mirror image.

Study next

Water images, where the mirror lies along a horizontal lineMirror images of capital letters, where A, H, I, M, O, T, U, V, W, X and Y survive a vertical mirror unchangedMirror images of line drawings and clock faces

Common traps

Reversing the order of the digits but leaving each digit facing the normal way
Treating an unchanged symmetric digit as proof that the option is wrong
Confusing a lateral mirror with a water image, which flips top and bottom instead

SSC prints this exact stem — the mirror is placed at MN as shown — 43 times across the 35 CGL 2024 papers.

The strip changes, the stem does not: the digits 72501 here, the letters M J X W U at 9 Sep 2024, 12:30, Reasoning Q.2.

Related PYQs

No directly related past PYQ was found.