© 2026 LearnInShort
A ranking question gives you someone's place from one end and asks for the other end, or for the size of the row. It looks like plain counting, and that is exactly why marks leak here — counting by hand is slow, and an off-by-one error looks perfectly reasonable while you are making it.
Two statements remove the guesswork completely. Position from the left plus position from the right equals Total plus 1. Rearranged, Total equals Left plus Right minus 1. The plus one and the minus one both exist for the same reason: the person you are locating gets counted once from each side, so exactly one seat is double-counted and has to be removed.
The alphabet test is the same idea wearing different clothes. A to Z is a row of 26 letters, so a letter's position from the right is 27 minus its position from the left. Everything in this topic is those two facts applied to different wordings.
1. In a row of students, Ravi is 12th from the left end and 18th from the right end. How many students are there in the row?
2. In a class of 40 students, Sita's rank is 15th from the top. What is her rank from the bottom?
3. In a row, Amit is 7th from the left end and Bina is 15th from the left end. How many students are there strictly between Amit and Bina?
4. Which letter is 5th to the left of the 13th letter from the left end of the English alphabet?
5. The letter R occupies which position counted from the right end of the English alphabet?
6. In a row, Anu is 10th from the left and Bhanu is 8th from the right. They interchange their positions, after which Anu becomes 15th from the left. What is the total number of persons in the row?
7. Which letter is 4th to the right of the 20th letter from the left end of the English alphabet?
8. In a row of 25 children, Rahul is 9th from the left end and Sonia is 12th from the right end. How many children stand between Rahul and Sonia?