Mixed and Puzzle-Based Relations: Speed Strategy

The hardest questions in this chapter combine two ideas — a direction path that also carries a family relation, or a seating line where you must rank people and read their relationships at once. SBI Clerk uses these to separate fast candidates from slow ones. There is no new theory here; the entire skill is managing a combined diagram calmly and, just as importantly, knowing the exact moment to abandon a question and protect your easier marks.

Direction Plus Relation Combos

A typical combo says a person walks in some direction to reach a relative, then asks the relative's connection or the final direction. Handle the two layers separately: first draw the direction path and fix positions, then attach the family tree at each labelled point. Keeping the movement grid and the relation tree as two clean sketches side by side stops the two kinds of information from bleeding into each other and confusing you.

The Speed Approach

Give every question a mental time budget and honour it. A single-sentence blood relation or a direct ranking deserves twenty seconds; a coded chain or a distance question deserves thirty; a full mixed puzzle may be worth a minute, but only if the marks are there. The core loop is: read, decide if it is quick, and if it is, solve immediately; if it looks tangled, mark it and move on. Speed in reasoning comes from good triage, not from solving everything.

When to Skip

The single most valuable exam-day skill is walking away from a question that is not paying out. If a mixed puzzle has not started to resolve within about forty seconds, or the relationships form a tangle you cannot anchor to one fixed person, leave it and return only if time remains. In a sectional-timed paper the real cost of a stubborn question is the two or three easy marks elsewhere that go unattempted while you fight it. Guarding those easy marks lifts your score far more than cracking one hard puzzle.

Solved Example

Example: From home Sita walks 3 km north to her father's shop, then 4 km east to her brother's office. The office is 5 km (3-4-5 triple) north-east of home, and her brother is her father's son — one grid plus one tiny tree solves both parts.

✗ Merging the direction path and the family links into one messy sketch  |  ✓ Keeping a separate movement grid and relation tree, solved in turn

Building the Two-Sketch Habit in Mocks

The separate-sketch method only becomes automatic through mock practice, so treat every mock as a drill in drawing fast and cleanly. Train yourself to reach for the grid and the tree without hesitating, because a second of doubt over how to start is what pushes a mixed puzzle past its time budget. Over a few dozen practice sets you will notice the combos stop feeling special — they become a direction question and a relation question that happen to share the same names — and your accuracy on them climbs while your time on them falls. That transfer from panic to routine is exactly what a screening test rewards.