Reasoning Ability
Reasoning Ability
Reasoning Ability in the J&K Bank Banking Associate exam tests how you extract a rule from a set of conditions and apply it without adding assumptions. The question mix is typically puzzles and seating arrangement, syllogism, blood relations, direction sense, order/ranking, coding-decoding, inequalities, alphanumeric series and data sufficiency. Most marks are lost not to hard questions but to a single misread condition.
Core rules that carry marks
- In syllogism, treat "some" as "at least one" and never as "some but not all". "All A are B" and "No A is B" give definite conclusions; "some" statements convert only into another "some" statement.
- In inequalities, combine only chains with the same direction. A > B = C < D tells you nothing about A and D.
- In seating, fix one person or one row first, then mark left/right from the direction each person faces. For a north-facing row, a person's left is your left; for a south-facing row it is reversed.
- In coding-decoding, check letter positions (A=1 ... Z=26), reversals and shifts before assuming a word-level code.
Worked example
Statements: All clerks are officers. Some officers are cashiers.
Conclusions: (I) Some clerks are cashiers. (II) Some cashiers are officers.
Draw two circles: clerks inside officers; cashiers overlapping officers. Conclusion I is not forced, because the cashiers who are officers may lie outside the clerks circle. Conclusion II is the converse of "Some officers are cashiers", and an I-type statement converts to "Some cashiers are officers". Hence only II follows.
Traps
- Reversing "All A are B" into "All B are A".
- Treating "either/or" conclusions as correct when both conclusions can be false together.
- Ignoring "only", "not all" and "at least" qualifiers in puzzles.
- In direction sense, forgetting that a left turn after facing south changes the reference axis.