General Intelligence and Reasoning
What this domain tests
General Intelligence and Reasoning in ESIC SSO rewards pattern recognition under time pressure. The paper carries no separate sectional time limit, so every minute saved here is transferred to Quantitative Aptitude. Question families repeat predictably: number and letter series, coding–decoding, blood relations, direction sense, syllogism, seating and puzzle arrangements, order-ranking, analogy and classification, plus a few data-sufficiency items.
Rules worth memorising
- Coding–decoding: fix the alphabet's positional values (A=1 … Z=26; reverse M=14, N=13). Check the shift separately for each letter before assuming one uniform shift.
- Syllogism: 'All A are B' places A inside B. 'Some A are B' leaves the rest of A undetermined. Only 'No' statements force exclusion.
- Circular arrangement: when everyone faces the centre, a person's right is anticlockwise; when they face outward, right is clockwise.
- Blood relations: build a tree marking gender explicitly, and never assign a gender the question has not stated.
Worked example
A man walks 8 m north, turns right and walks 6 m, then turns right and walks 8 m. How far is he from the start? First leg: 8 m north. Right turn gives 6 m east. Second right turn gives 8 m south. The north and south legs cancel, leaving a net displacement of 6 m east. Pythagoras is needed only when two perpendicular components survive; here only one does, so the answer is 6 m.
Traps
Assuming 'some A are B' also means 'some A are not B'; reading 'only a few' as 'all'; missing that a puzzle has a mirror-image second solution when left/right is not fixed; forgetting that ranking questions may ask for position from the other end; and sinking minutes into a five-mark puzzle before the easy series questions are secured.