Floor and Box Puzzles

Floor and box puzzles arrange items vertically — people living on floors of a building, or boxes stacked one above another. They are a favourite in SBI Clerk because the skeleton is simple: a single column of positions. The whole skill is translating 'above', 'below' and 'between' clues into a top-to-bottom order without ever confusing which direction is which. Get the direction convention fixed once and these become some of the fastest marks in the section.

Fix Your Direction Convention First

Before reading clues, decide that the top floor is the highest number and the ground floor is one, then keep that fixed for the entire puzzle. 'Above' means a higher number, 'below' means a lower number. Most floor-puzzle errors are not logic errors at all but a candidate flipping the direction halfway through. Write a small arrow beside your column pointing to 'top' so your eye never has to reconstruct which way is up while you are placing clues under time pressure.

Converting Above and Below Clues

Translate each clue into a position or a gap before placing it. 'P lives immediately above Q' means P and Q are adjacent with P one number higher. 'There are two floors between R and S' means their positions differ by three, and you must test both orders of R and S unless another clue fixes which is higher. Turning words into a numeric gap the moment you read them stops you from re-interpreting the same clue twice and keeps the build moving forward.

Anchor on the Extremes

The strongest clues in a floor puzzle name the top floor, the bottom floor, or the exact floor number, so hunt for those first and lock them in. Once an extreme is fixed, floating clues about who is above or below suddenly have a wall to lean against and start resolving quickly. A puzzle that looks tangled often unravels the instant you place the one person whose floor is stated outright, so scan every clue for that anchor before doing anything else.

Box Puzzles Work Identically

A stack of boxes is the same puzzle with different labels: the top box replaces the top floor and 'kept above' replaces 'lives above'. Sometimes a box puzzle adds a second variable such as colour or weight, which turns it into a categorization puzzle laid on a vertical frame — build the stack first, then attach the extra attribute to each fixed box. Treating boxes and floors as one topic means you prepare once and solve both, and the direction discipline carries over unchanged. When the extra variable appears, resist the urge to juggle it while the stack is still incomplete; a half-placed stack with attributes already attached is far harder to correct than a finished stack you decorate afterwards.

Solved Example

Example: Six boxes are stacked. Clue: box M is at the top. Clue: two boxes lie between M and N. So N is on the fourth position from top (M is 6, gap of two means N is 3rd from top). A further clue, 'O is immediately below N', fixes O next. Anchoring on M at the top made every later clue snap into place — the order from top is M, _, N, O, _, _, ready for the questions.

✗ Flipping 'above' to mean a lower floor midway through  |  ✓ Fixing top = highest number once and never changing it