SSC CGL 2024 Tier-I · 9 September 2024, Shift 1 · General Intelligence and Reasoning · Question 20 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.

In a certain code language, ‘what where how’ is written as ‘aa dd ff’; ‘where there that’ is written as ‘dd zz pp’ and ‘which what here’ is written as ‘ff kk ll’. How is ‘how’ written in that language?

(a)aa
(b)kk
(c)zz
(d)ff

Answer

Why

Correct — A. Codes are never given in the same order as the words, so the only safe move is to match statements on the word they share.

Statements 1 and 3 share exactly one word, what, and their code sets share exactly one code, ff. So what = ff.

Statements 1 and 2 share exactly one word, where, and their code sets share exactly one code, dd. So where = dd.

Statement 1 is 'what where how' = 'aa dd ff'. With ff and dd already taken, the only code left for how is aa — option (a).

Why the others are wrong

(b)
kk — kk appears only in statement 3, so it codes either 'which' or 'here'. Neither word occurs in the statement that contains 'how'.
(c)
zz — zz appears only in statement 2, so it codes either 'there' or 'that'. The word 'how' is not in statement 2 at all.
(d)
ff — ff is the code for 'what', fixed by the fact that ff is the one code common to statements 1 and 3, exactly as 'what' is the one word common to them.

Concept

In a substitution code of this kind each word has one fixed code, but the codes inside a statement are deliberately scrambled, so position tells you nothing.

The whole method is intersection. Take two statements, list the words they have in common and the codes they have in common. If each list has exactly one entry, that word and that code are paired for good.

Once enough pairs are fixed, the target word falls out by elimination inside the statement that contains it.

Key facts

Statements 1 and 2 share only the word 'where' and only the code 'dd', so where is dd.
Statements 1 and 3 share only the word 'what' and only the code 'ff', so what is ff.
'there', 'that', 'which' and 'here' stay unresolved, and the question never needs them.

Study next

Coded-language items with four statements, where two rounds of intersection are needed before eliminationMessage-coding items in which the same word appears in three statements and is fixed directlyLetter-shift codes, where the code is derived from the word rather than assigned arbitrarily

Common traps

Matching a word to the code in the same position, when the codes are deliberately reordered
Comparing statements 2 and 3, which share no word and no code and therefore yield nothing
Stopping after one pair is found, when the target word needs two pairs before elimination works

SSC gives three statements and asks for the code of one word. The answer always sits in the statement containing that word, once the other two words in it have been pinned down from overlaps.

The distractor codes are drawn from the statements that do not contain the target word, which is why checking which statement a code appears in is usually enough to eliminate.

Related PYQs

No directly related past PYQ was found.