Reasoning and General Intelligence
What this section tests
Reasoning and General Intelligence checks how fast you can convert verbal conditions into one fixed structure and answer without re-reading the puzzle. The question mix is dominated by puzzles and seating arrangement, syllogism, inequality, coding-decoding, blood relations, direction sense, series (alphanumeric and numeric), order-ranking, data sufficiency and input-output.
Core rules
- Seating arrangement: fix one person first, then treat "facing outside" as an automatic left-right inversion (left becomes clockwise for outward-facing rows/circles).
- Syllogism: always test against the minimum overlap diagram, then use a second diagram only for possibility conclusions.
- "Only a few A are B" means some A are B and some A are not B, so it supports an "some" conclusion but blocks a universal one.
- Inequality: decode the chain in one pass and note that "≥" conclusions need the symbol to hold on every path between the two elements.
Worked example
Statements: All pens are books. Some books are red. Conclusions: I. Some pens are red. II. Some red are books. Draw pens inside books; the "some books are red" overlap may fall entirely outside the pens portion, so conclusion I is at best a possibility and does not follow. Conclusion II is simply the converse of a particular affirmative and always follows. Answer: only II follows.
Traps
- Marking a possibility conclusion as definite (or the reverse) - the commonest single loss in this section.
- Missing the complementary pair: an "Some A are B" and a "No A is B" on the same pair make an either-or case when both are individually wrong.
- Placing the last person in a puzzle without re-verifying every earlier clue.
- Assuming a fixed direction (north) when the question leaves it open.