SSC CGL 2024 Tier-I · 26 September 2024, Shift 1 · General Intelligence and Reasoning · Question 17 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.

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

Answer

Why

Correct — C. Rule: MN is drawn as a vertical line, so the mirror is lateral — the string reverses left to right and every character is itself flipped left to right.

Read Me39ha back to front and you get a, h, 9, 3, e, M. Each of those six glyphs must then be flipped, its bowls and tails changing sides.

M is symmetric about a vertical axis, so it is the one character a vertical mirror leaves looking exactly as it was. Whatever else an option does, the M has to stay an M.

Option (c) reverses the order and laterally inverts all six glyphs while keeping that M upright.

Why the others are wrong

(a)
The M has become a W. Turning a character upside down is a reflection in a horizontal mirror — the water image — and MN here is vertical, so (a) has flipped the string along the wrong axis.
(b)
A W again where the M should be, and the h carries its arch at the bottom. Both are marks of a top-to-bottom flip, not the left-to-right one MN demands.
(d)
(d) reverses the order and keeps the M upright, but its 3 still faces the way it does in the original. A lateral inversion has to turn every character, digits included.

Concept

A mirror at MN reflects the figure across the line MN, so the first thing to read is how that line is drawn.

A vertical MN gives the lateral inversion: the order of characters reverses and each character flips left to right. A horizontal MN gives the water image: the order is kept and each character flips top to bottom.

Single characters tell the two apart instantly. A, H, I, M, O, T, U, V, W, X and Y are unchanged by a vertical mirror, while B, C, D, E, H, I, O and X are unchanged by a horizontal one.

The figure is text rather than a shape, which is a gift — you can check an option character by character instead of judging a whole picture, and one unflipped glyph is enough to eliminate it.

Key facts

A mirror at a vertical MN reverses the reading order of a string.
Every individual character is also flipped in a lateral inversion, not just repositioned.
M is symmetric about a vertical axis, so it survives a vertical mirror unchanged.
An M that has become a W indicates a horizontal mirror, which is the water image.

Study next

Water image of letters and digits, the horizontal-mirror counterpart of this itemMirror images of clock faces, where the reflected time is 11:60 minus the real timeWhich capitals and digits are symmetric about each axis, memorised as two short lists

Common traps

Reversing the order but forgetting to flip the individual glyphs
Treating the mirror as a 180 degree rotation, which is a different transformation
Skipping the digits because 3 and 9 look busy, when they are the fastest characters to check

SSC draws the figure with the mirror line labelled M at one end and N at the other, and the orientation of that line is the whole question. Mirror-image items also run 26 Sep 2024, 16:00, Reasoning Q.6 and 24 Sep 2024, 16:00, Reasoning Q.1.

Related PYQs

No directly related past PYQ was found.