Blood relations is a guaranteed two to three marks in both banking and SSC papers, and it is almost pure notation discipline. Candidates who solve it in their heads lose marks not to difficulty but to the fourth or fifth link in a chain, where the sentence structure inverts and the mind quietly swaps the two people around.
“Pointing to a man, the woman said, ‘His mother is my father's only daughter.’” Start at “my father's only daughter”, resolve it to the speaker herself, then walk outward. Reading these sentences left to right is what makes them feel hard; they are built to be unwound from the innermost phrase.
Grandparents on the top line, parents below, children below that. Siblings share a level and join with a horizontal line; couples join with a double line. The instant the tree is drawn to levels, “uncle” and “cousin” become things you see rather than things you deduce.
Use + and − or M and F beside every node. Many wrong answers come from assuming a gender the passage never gave — “the engineer”, “the doctor” and most names carry none. If gender is never stated for a node, the relation asked about it may genuinely be indeterminate.
Trace the path between the two people the question names: up to a shared ancestor, then down. Up-one-down-one via a parent is a sibling; up-two-down-one is an uncle or aunt; up-two-down-two is a cousin. Name the relation only after the path is on paper.
| Path between the two people | The relation |
|---|---|
| Up 1, down 1 (shared parent) | Brother or sister |
| Up 2, down 1 (shared grandparent) | Uncle or aunt / nephew or niece |
| Up 2, down 2 | Cousin |
| Up 1 only | Father or mother |
| Down 1 only | Son or daughter |
| Across a double line, then down 1 | Son-in-law or daughter-in-law |
Every question below was generated by the same engine that mints the Deduce daily puzzle, and machine-proven to have exactly one correct answer before it reached this page. The walkthrough is the engine's own, step for step.
How is Manish related to Rahul?
Use only the relationships stated below.
Manish is the son of Suresh.
Karan is the father of Suresh.
Karan is the father of Rahul.
How is Anjali related to Manish?
Use only the relationships stated below.
Anjali is the daughter of Geeta.
Geeta is the mother of Ritu.
Ritu is the mother of Manish.
How is Anjali related to Arjun?
Use only the relationships stated below.
Anjali is the daughter of Rahul.
Arjun is the father of Rahul.
“The doctor” and “the teacher” have no gender in these questions, and neither do most names used. If the passage never states it, treat it as unknown — and if the asked relation depends on it, the correct answer is that it cannot be determined.
A three-link chain is manageable mentally; a five-link chain is not, and papers know it. The tree costs about twenty seconds to draw and removes the entire class of error where two people quietly swap places mid-sentence.
Words like “only”, “eldest” and “sole” are hard constraints that resolve a node uniquely, and they are usually the hinge the whole question turns on. Circle them as you read.
One puzzle a day, timed on the server, with a national and state leaderboard and a streak that survives as long as you do. Practising a topic once is worth little; the aspirants who move are the ones who show up daily. See what Deduce does or read the rules first.
Start your streak free →Resolve the innermost phrase first and always relative to the speaker. In “His mother is my father's only daughter”, the phrase “my father's only daughter” resolves to the speaker herself, so the speaker is the man's mother and he is her son. Working outward from the innermost phrase turns these from memory tests into two-step deductions.
Generation levels with gender marks: each generation on its own horizontal line, + or − for male and female, a double line for a married couple, and a single line down for a parent-child link. It takes seconds to learn and it is the same notation the walkthroughs below use.
Typically two to three marks in banking prelims, often as one coded-relation set, and one or two standalone questions in SSC CGL. Because the method is fixed and the diagram is quick, it is one of the best marks-per-minute topics in the paper.
A variant where symbols replace the relationship words — A + B might mean “A is the father of B”. Decode the symbol legend into ordinary words first, write them above the expression, then draw the same tree. The difficulty is entirely in the translation step, not the family logic.
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