SSC CGL 2024 Tier-I · 26 September 2024, Shift 3 · General Intelligence and Reasoning · Question 12 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.

In a certain code language, ‘open the door’ is coded as 'wu ko tn' and ‘door is solid’ is coded as ‘ko gk mb’. How is ‘door’ coded in the given language?

(a)wu
(b)tn
(c)ko
(d)gk

Answer

Why

Correct — C. Rule: the word the two sentences share must carry the code the two sentences share.

'open the door' is coded wu ko tn
'door is solid' is coded ko gk mb

The word appearing in both sentences is door. The code appearing in both lines is ko.

Because each word has exactly one token and the tokens are printed in a scrambled order, the overlap can only match the overlap: door is ko, option (c).

Why the others are wrong

(a)
wu — wu appears in the first sentence alone. A token confined to one sentence cannot be tied to any particular word in it, since 'open' and 'the' are equally unaccounted for.
(b)
tn — tn also appears only in the first sentence, so it stands for 'open' or for 'the'. Nothing in the second sentence can decide which, because neither word is there.
(d)
gk — gk appears only in the second sentence, so it codes 'is' or 'solid'. The word being asked about, door, sits in both sentences, so its code must sit in both lines too.

Concept

Word-substitution coding does not encrypt letters. Each whole word is given an arbitrary token, the tokens are printed in a shuffled order, and that order carries no information.

So work by intersection. Set the two sentences side by side, find the words they share and the codes they share, and match one set to the other. One shared word with one shared code is the cleanest case there is.

Never read the tokens positionally. In 'open the door' coded as 'wu ko tn', wu is not 'open' — the order has been scrambled on purpose.

This is the two-sentence version, where a single overlap settles the answer outright. Longer versions give three or four sentences and need two intersections before any one word is fixed.

Key facts

In word-substitution coding the order of the tokens is scrambled and means nothing.
'door' is the word common to both sentences and 'ko' is the code common to both lines.
A token that appears in one sentence alone cannot be tied to a single word.

Study next

Three-sentence word coding, where two overlaps are needed to fix one wordLetter-shift coding, where NAME is written as FNBO by moving each letterCoded relationship questions where a plus sign means 'is the mother of'

Common traps

Matching the first token to the first word, as though the order were preserved
Choosing a token that appears in only one of the two sentences
Trying to decode letter by letter, which this style of question never rewards

SSC prints two coded sentences with one word in common and asks for that word's code, which makes the intersection the whole method.

The same frame appears at 09 Sep 2024, 12:30, Reasoning Q.6, where 'let it go' and 'this is it' share 'it' and the code 'vc'.

Related PYQs

No directly related past PYQ was found.