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South Indian Bank Clerk study materials
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South Indian Bank Clerk: Reasoning Ability: Building Fixed Structures from Verbal Clues

South Indian Bank Clerk · Work through your exam, one topic at a time.

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Reasoning Ability: Building Fixed Structures from Verbal Clues

Reasoning Ability in the South Indian Bank Clerk exam tests how fast you can convert a paragraph of verbal clues into one fixed structure - a seating row, a floor grid, a coded word or a blood-relation tree. The bulk of the section is usually puzzle-and-arrangement sets, with the rest spread across syllogism, inequality, coding-decoding, direction sense, order-ranking, alphanumeric series and data sufficiency. Because a single puzzle carries four to six questions, one wrong placement can wipe out a whole set; settle the structure before you start answering.

Build the skeleton first

  • Note the facing direction before anything else. For a circular arrangement, a person facing the centre has their left towards the clockwise direction; facing outward, left is anticlockwise. Get this wrong and the entire set mirrors.
  • In floor puzzles, draw a vertical stack and fix floor numbers on the left edge; in row puzzles, convert phrases like "second to the left of" into index arithmetic on the drawing.
  • Where a clue permits two placements, split into Case 1 and Case 2 and let the next clue kill one of them; do not guess.

Syllogism and inequality rules

  • "All A are B" converts to "Some B are A"; "Some A are B" is reversible; "No A is B" converts to "No B is A".
  • "Only a few A are B" means Some A are B and Some A are not B.
  • An either-or answer needs a complementary pair (Some/No, or All/Some-not) on the same subject-predicate, with neither conclusion following alone.

Worked example

Statements: All pens are books. Some books are red. Conclusions: I. Some pens are red. II. Some books are pens. Reasoning: "All pens are books" converts to "Some books are pens", so II follows. The red books may sit entirely outside the pen subset, so I is only a possibility, not a definite conclusion. Answer: only II follows.

Traps that cost marks

  • Mirrored diagrams in outward-facing circular sets.
  • Treating a possibility as a definite conclusion in syllogism.
  • In alphanumeric series, missing that a question needs both conditions (preceded by a letter and followed by a symbol) at once.
  • In data sufficiency, over-solving when the data is already sufficient.