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The Chapter You Lose on a Word, Not a Calculation
Seating arrangement is pure logic — no formulas to forget, no arithmetic to slip on. And yet it is where candidates bleed the most marks in the reasoning section, because almost every wrong answer here comes from one small word: left.
Left of whom? Left as *you* see the diagram, or left as the *person in the seat* sees it? Those are opposite directions, and a paper-setter who wants to separate the careful from the careless only has to write "all facing south" instead of "all facing north".
So treat this chapter as two skills, not one. The first is direction bookkeeping — knowing whose left you are being asked about. The second is clue ordering — starting from the one statement that fixes somebody in place, and saving the vague "X is not next to Y" statements for the end.
Get those two right and a five-question set that takes others eight minutes takes you three.
1. In a row of 40 students all facing north, Ravi is 12th from the left end and Sunil is 18th from the right end. How many students sit between Ravi and Sunil?
2. Meena is 9th from the left end and 14th from the right end in a row of children. How many children are there in the row?
3. Five friends A, B, C, D and E sit around a circular table facing the centre. A sits between D and E. B sits second to the left of D. C is not adjacent to E. Who sits to the immediate right of C?
4. Two rows sit facing each other: Row 1 faces north and Row 2 faces south. The LEFT side of a Row-1 member corresponds to which side of the Row-2 member sitting exactly opposite him?
5. Seven boys sit in a row facing north. D sits exactly in the middle. A is third to the left of D and G is second to the right of D. How many boys sit between A and G?
6. Eight persons sit around a circular table facing OUTWARD. Which statement about their left and right is correct?
7. In a row of 25 girls facing north, Anita is 7th from the left end. If she shifts 4 places to the right, what will be her new position from the right end?
8. Five friends sit on a bench. B is to the left of C but to the right of A. D is to the right of C but to the left of E. Who sits in the middle?