SSC CGL 2024 Tier-I · 9 September 2024, Shift 2 · General Intelligence and Reasoning · Question 6 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 5 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, ‘let it go’ is coded as ‘vc nt ap’ and ‘this is it’ is coded as ‘mq vc lh’. What is the code for ‘it’ in that language?

(a)nt
(b)lh
(c)vc
(d)mq

Answer

Why

Correct — C. Rule: one shared word and one shared code can only pair with each other.

'let it go' and 'this is it' have exactly one word in common: it.

Their code groups, 'vc nt ap' and 'mq vc lh', have exactly one code in common: vc.

The order inside a group carries no information; the overlap does. So 'it' is vc.

Why the others are wrong

(a)
nt — nt appears only in the first code group, so it stands for 'let' or 'go'. Which of the two, the data cannot say — but it is certainly not the shared word.
(b)
lh — lh appears only in the second group, so it codes 'this' or 'is' — a word that appears in only one of the two sentences.
(d)
mq — mq also appears only in the second group. Like lh, it codes 'this' or 'is', never the word the two sentences share.

Concept

Substitution coding is solved by intersection, never by word order. The codes inside a group are deliberately scrambled, so the first code does not belong to the first word.

What carries information is overlap. If two sentences share exactly one word and their code groups share exactly one code, that pairing is forced and no further data is needed.

Share two words instead and you get an unordered pair, and a third sentence is needed to separate them.

Only one of the six words here can be decoded. 'let' and 'go' stay interchangeable, as do 'this' and 'is' — and SSC asks about the single word the data can actually fix.

Key facts

Codes in these items are printed in scrambled order, so position carries no information.
One common word plus one common code fixes that pairing uniquely.
Here nt and ap are 'let' and 'go' in an order the data does not settle.

Study next

Three-sentence coding, where a third line separates two shared wordsLetter-shift coding, where each letter moves a fixed number of placesNumber coding, where a word maps to a sum of letter positions

Common traps

Lining the codes up with the words in the order printed
Answering with a code that appears in only one of the two sentences
Trying to decode all six words when the question asks for one

SSC keeps this shape to two short sentences with a single shared word — find the intersection on both sides and the item is over in seconds. The same shift runs the two-shared-words version at Reasoning Q.11.

Related PYQs

No directly related past PYQ was found.