Verbal reasoning forms an essential part of a number of exams. Various types of questions are asked in this section. One of these is the ‘logical sequence of words’. In this article, we will discuss the concept and tricks to tackle the related questions.
In this topic, Continuous literals will be given, and we have to find out missing or next literal of given problem.
Alphanumeric (sometimes shortened to alphameric) is a combination of alphabetic and numeric characters. In some cases, it may include upper and lower case letters, punctuation marks, and symbols (such as @, &, and *,).
This type of reasoning is a mixed bag of coding-decoding, series-based reasoning and finding positions based reasoning questions.
Note: Literals can be numbers, symbols and alphabet.
Pre-Requisites
Squares, cubes up to 30 will be required for easy and quick solution of problem.
Numeric position of alphabet is required for alphabet based series.
It is necessary to have knowledge about prime and composite numbers, Fibonacci series and factorial of a number. It is mandatory, because problems can be based on any of the above concepts.
Suggestions
The mere fact that there are infinite ways to solve them makes these questions a tough nut to crack. It is not possible to guess the way the numbers are arranged in your first attempt. You will need to try the same question multiple times and calculate at lightning fast speed.
- i) Draw basic chart of alphabet having letters and their numerical position.
Note: Write reverse numbers also i.e. a-26, b-25, c-24 …up to a-1 or use another approach of writing letters and their numerical position by multiplication of 5.
- ii) Addition of a letter’s numerical position from ascending and descending order is 27.
E.g.: A-1-26 (1+26=27),
B-2-25 (2+25=27) .....
Y-25-2 (25+2=27)
Z-26-1 (26+1=27)
- iii) Use pyramid approach if you are not getting any series even after single iteration. E.g.:
Diagram of Pyramid based problem.