SSC CGL 2024 Tier-I · 9 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 6 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.

Identify the figure from the given options, which when put in place of the question mark (?), will logically complete the series.

Answer

Why

Correct — B. The same five letters A to E fill the same five cells in every frame, so only their positions change.

Rule: each letter moves one step along the loop top-left → top-right → bottom-right → bottom-left → centre → top-left.

Frame 1 reads A top-left, B top-right, C bottom-right, D bottom-left, E centre. Frame 2 reads A top-right, B bottom-right, C bottom-left, D centre, E top-left. Every letter has advanced exactly one stop.

Frame 4 reads C top-left, D top-right, B centre, A bottom-left, E bottom-right. One more step sends A to the centre, B to the top-left, C to the top-right, D to the bottom-right and E to the bottom-left.

That frame is B top-left, C top-right, A centre, E bottom-left, D bottom-right — option (b).

Why the others are wrong

(a)
The centre is right, but D sits at the top-left, where B belongs. D was at the top-right of frame 4 and must go on to the bottom-right, not back to the top-left.
(c)
It repeats the wrong arrangement of option (a) and prints D, B, C and E laterally inverted. No frame in the series mirrors a letter.
(d)
Four of the five letters are mirror-printed, and the arrangement is wrong too: A is left at the bottom-left, the cell it already occupied in frame 4.

Concept

This is the letter form of a positional-rotation series. The alphabet is irrelevant. A through E are five labels attached to five moving tokens.

Track one letter across two frames and you have the route for all five, because they share a single loop and never overtake one another.

The loop here walks the four corners clockwise and puts the centre between the bottom-left and the top-left, making five stops for five letters.

Two of the four option figures print their letters as mirror images. That is the real discriminator on this item, and it is invisible unless you look at the shape of each letter rather than reading the frame as a word.

Key facts

Frame 1 is A top-left, B top-right, C bottom-right, D bottom-left, E centre.
The route is top-left, top-right, bottom-right, bottom-left, centre, back to top-left.
With five stops for five letters, a sixth frame would reproduce frame 1 exactly.

Study next

Mirror-image and water-image items, where a laterally inverted letter is the whole questionPositional rotation where two symbols swap on a short loop while the rest run on a long oneFigure series that rotate the frame itself rather than moving the contents between cells

Common traps

Matching the letters and never checking whether they are printed the right way round
Assuming the loop is the four corners only, which leaves the centre letter unaccounted for
Running the loop backwards, which produces the arrangement in option (a)

SSC runs the identical positional loop on shapes at Reasoning Q.14 of this shift, where a circle, a triangle, a square and two arrows travel a five-cell route.

When the options use letters rather than shapes, expect at least one option to be correct in arrangement but mirror-printed.

Related PYQs

No directly related past PYQ was found.