Blood relation questions are the ones aspirants solve correctly in their head at home and get wrong in the exam hall, and the reason is almost always the same: they tried to hold four generations in memory instead of spending fifteen seconds drawing them. SSC's version of this chapter is rarely difficult - it is deliberately confusing, built out of sentences like 'the only son of my grandfather's daughter-in-law' that unwind cleanly on paper and tangle completely in the head. In CGL Tier-1 the reasoning section is 25 questions locked to 15 minutes, so the goal is not cleverness but a method boring enough to survive pressure. This page brings together real previous-year SSC blood relation questions with the commission's own answer keys, grouped by the format they are asked in.
Blood relations sit in the General Intelligence & Reasoning section of CGL Tier-1 - 25 questions, 50 marks, a 15-minute sectional lock, +2 for correct and -0.50 for wrong. SSC's official General Intelligence syllabus covers this under relationship concepts, which is also the head that produces ranking and ordering questions. The chapter turns up across shifts but not in a fixed quantity, so prepare it for speed rather than for volume. The same relationship concepts carry into the Tier-2 Reasoning & General Intelligence module of 30 questions and 90 marks, where the chains tend to run one generation longer.
We teach a single notation and stay with it: a horizontal line for the same generation, a vertical line for parent to child, a plus for male, a minus for female, and a double line for a married couple. The whole point is that under a sectional timer you should not be inventing notation, you should be executing it. Every solution in our blood relation sets is worked in that same notation, so you see the identical method a few hundred times rather than a different one each question.
SSC asks two quite different things under one name. One is the plain-language puzzle - 'pointing to a photograph, he said...'. The other is coded, where A+B means A is the brother of B and you must decode a chain like P-Q*R+S. They fail for different reasons and need separate practice, so our sets keep them apart and only mix them once each is solid. The coded ones reward strict left-to-right evaluation, which is the single habit most people are missing.
Some relation words in Indian family structure do not map to a single English term, and occasionally a question's phrasing admits two readings. Because about 29,000 of our roughly 31,000 questions are real previous-year SSC questions carrying SSC's own official answer keys, you can see how the commission itself resolved a disputed reading - which is far more useful than a coaching book asserting a convention. Where a question is genuinely loose, the explanation says so rather than pretending otherwise.
After a mock, the AI sorts your reasoning mistakes into conceptual, calculation, careless and time-pressure. For blood relations the split is telling: a conceptual error means you do not have the maternal and paternal vocabulary straight, while a careless one usually means you skipped the diagram. It then builds a 7-day plan from whichever pattern dominates, and estimates your All-India rank against real 2020-24 cut-off data so you know what the gap actually costs.
Always draw. Put each person on a horizontal level by generation, connect parent to child with a vertical line, mark gender with plus and minus symbols, and join a married pair with a double line. Then read the sentence one clause at a time, adding a single connection per clause rather than trying to absorb the whole statement first. It takes about fifteen seconds and it converts a question that fails under pressure into one that cannot.
First write the code key down in a corner - plus means brother of, minus means sister of, and so on, exactly as the question defines it - because misremembering the key halfway through is the commonest failure. Then evaluate strictly from left to right, building the family tree one symbol at a time, never jumping to the end of the chain. Read carefully whether the code says 'A + B means A is the brother of B' or 'B is the brother of A', because SSC reverses this deliberately. The direction of the relation, not the relation itself, is what the question is testing.
Work it inwards. 'My father's only son' is the speaker himself, assuming the speaker is male. So 'the son of my father's only son' is the speaker's son, and the man in the photograph is his son. The trap is the word 'only' - if the speaker is female, 'my father's only son' is her brother, and the man becomes her nephew. SSC exploits exactly this by not always telling you the speaker's gender in the clause you expect it in, so check for it before you answer.
It varies from shift to shift, so no honest answer gives you a fixed number. Blood relations appear regularly within the 25-question General Intelligence & Reasoning section under SSC's relationship concepts head, sometimes as a single question, sometimes alongside a ranking or ordering question from the same family. Prepare it as a fast, dependable earner worth a minute of your section, and check the official notification on ssc.gov.in for the syllabus applicable to your cycle.
Topic-wise practice and the Daily Practice Paper - 10 questions a day with a streak and a daily leaderboard - are available on the free tier, and three full-length mock tests a week are free too (15-minute single-section papers are unlimited), running the actual Tier-1 format of 100 questions across four sections of 25 with 15-minute sectional locks and +2/-0.50 marking. If a particular family chain will not resolve, the AI reasoning tutor works in Hindi and English, with 8 messages a day on the free tier.
SSCIntel — free AI-powered SSC mock tests