General Mental Ability · UPSC Civil Services

What the official syllabus says

Preliminary Examination, General Studies Paper II:
General mental ability;

General mental ability is the broadest of the paper's areas. It covers verbal, numerical and visual puzzles that test pattern recognition, attention to detail and quick, accurate thinking. Several topics below also draw on Basic Numeracy.

Topics in detail

Series and patterns

Number series: differences, ratios, squares and cubes, primes, alternating and mixed series.
Letter series and alphanumeric series; position of letters in the alphabet (A = 1 to Z = 26) and in reverse.
Missing term in a series or a grid; the wrong term in a series.
Repeating patterns: finding the nth term or the letter at a given position.
Non-verbal series: figures that rotate, add or lose elements in a pattern.

Coding and symbols

Letter coding, number coding and substitution coding.
Coding of sentences: finding the code of a word from several coded sentences.
Mathematical operations with changed symbols ("+ means ×").
Input-output and machine arrangement steps.
Alphabet test: arranging words in dictionary order; forming words from given letters.

Analogy and classification

Word, number and letter analogies (A is to B as C is to ?).
Odd one out: number, word, letter group and figure classification.

Clocks and calendars

Angle between the hands of a clock; times when the hands coincide, are opposite or at right angles.
Clocks that gain or lose time; mirror images of clocks.
Odd days; leap years; the day of the week on a given date; calendars that repeat.

Clock and calendar fact	Value
Minute hand moves	6° per minute
Hour hand moves	0.5° per minute
Minute hand gains on hour hand	5.5° per minute
Hands coincide in 12 hours	11 times
Hands at right angles in 12 hours	22 times
Odd days in an ordinary year / a leap year	1 / 2
Odd days in 100 / 200 / 300 / 400 years	5 / 3 / 1 / 0

Visual and spatial ability

Cubes: painted cubes cut into smaller cubes; counting faces painted on one, two or three sides.
Dice: opposite faces from several positions of the same die; standard and non-standard dice.
Counting figures: triangles, squares and rectangles in a figure.
Mirror images and water images of letters, numbers and figures.
Paper folding and cutting; completing a figure; embedded figures.
Patterns of shaded cells in grids and matrices.

Quick reasoning with numbers

Arranging digits or numbers by conditions; numbers formed from given digits.
Counting problems: how many numbers, handshakes, matches in a tournament.
Age and position puzzles solved by reasoning rather than by algebra.
Magic squares and number grids with a rule across rows and columns.

Method

Checking simple patterns first (differences, then ratios, then squares and cubes).
Writing out letter positions once and reusing them.
Drawing the net of a cube or the positions of a die rather than visualising alone.

Overlaps

Arrangements, directions and blood relations are on the Logical Reasoning and Analytical Ability page.
Arithmetic underlying number puzzles is on the Basic Numeracy page.