Profit and loss looks friendly until SSC stacks it. A single question can hand you a marked price, a discount on it, a further discount for cash, a false weight at the counter and then ask for the effective profit percent. Aspirants rarely lose these questions because they do not know the formula; they lose them because they lose track of which quantity is the base at each step. The fix is to stop treating cost price, selling price and marked price as three numbers to juggle and start treating them as one chain you walk down in order. This page shows that chain, the traps SSC repeats, and where to practise it on real papers.
Profit and loss is part of the arithmetic block of Quantitative Aptitude in CGL Tier-1, the 25-question and 50-mark section that carries its own 15-minute timer inside the 60-minute paper, marked at +2 for a correct answer and -0.50 for a wrong one. The Commission names profit and loss, and discount, explicitly in its Quantitative Aptitude syllabus, but it does not publish how many questions any topic gets, and the count does shift between papers and shifts, so we will not invent one. What is dependable is that profit and loss is one of the arithmetic topics that appears in some form in most Tier-1 quant sections, often blended with percentage or ratio rather than standing alone, and that the same topic reappears at a higher standard in Tier-2's mathematical abilities module. Confirm the current cycle's schedule from the official notification.
When a question gives you only percentages and no rupees, set CP = 100 and everything else becomes arithmetic you can do in your head. A 20% markup makes MP 120, a 10% discount makes SP 108, so the profit is 8 percent, no equations involved. Our practice sets deliberately mix these percent-only questions with rupee-value ones so you learn to recognise which is which in the first five seconds of reading.
Marked price, then discount, then selling price, then compare against cost price. Two successive discounts of a% and b% are not a+b; the net is a + b - ab/100, which is why 20% and 10% together give 28%, not 30%. Most SSC discount questions are just this chain with one link hidden, and once you always walk the chain in the same direction, the hidden link becomes obvious instead of alarming.
The false-weight family is a reliable SSC favourite and it frightens people unnecessarily. If a shopkeeper sells 900 g calling it a kilogram at cost price, the gain percent is (100/900) x 100, about 11.11 percent, because the extra 100 g is pure profit on the 900 g he actually gave. Our AI tutors will derive this with you in Hindi or English rather than handing you a formula to memorise, because the derivation is what protects you when the question adds a markup on top.
After a mock, the AI sorts every wrong answer into conceptual, calculation, careless or time-pressure. In profit and loss the most common conceptual error has one signature: computing the profit percent on selling price instead of cost price. Seeing that named, repeatedly, in your own report does more than another twenty practice questions would, and the seven-day plan built from those mistakes puts the right kind of question back in front of you.
Unless the question explicitly says otherwise, profit and loss percent in SSC papers are always calculated on the cost price. Profit percent is (SP - CP)/CP x 100. Questions that say "profit is 20% of the selling price" are deliberately changing the base, and they are worth slowing down for, because the arithmetic is easy and the trap is the whole question. When a paper does this, converting to CP as 100 immediately keeps you honest.
For successive discounts of a% and b%, the single equivalent discount is a + b - ab/100. So 20% followed by 10% is 20 + 10 - 2 = 28 percent, not 30. The order of the two discounts does not change the result, which is itself a small SSC favourite: papers sometimes ask whether the shopkeeper should apply the larger discount first, and the answer is that it makes no difference. The same structure with a plus sign, a + b + ab/100, handles successive markups.
Treat the shortfall in goods as the profit. If the seller gives x grams while charging for 1000 grams at cost price, the gain percent is (1000 - x)/x x 100. When the question also adds a markup or a discount, do the weight part and the price part separately and then combine them as successive percentage changes rather than trying to do both at once. Practising a batch of these back to back is the quickest way to make the pattern stick.
SSC does not release a topic-wise breakdown, and the count varies between shifts, so nobody can give you an honest exact number. What previous-year papers do show is that profit and loss appears in some form in most Tier-1 quant sections, frequently combined with percentage, discount or ratio rather than as a standalone question. Practise it as a core arithmetic topic rather than budgeting a fixed number of marks to it.
SSCIntel's question bank holds roughly 31,000 questions, of which about 29,000 are genuine previous-year SSC questions carrying the Commission's own official answer keys, drawn from CGL, CHSL, MTS and other SSC papers. That matters for this topic in particular, because the way SSC words a markup-plus-discount question is distinctive, and coaching-written imitations tend to be either cleaner or clumsier than the real thing. You can practise them free, and the free full mock test places them under the real 15-minute sectional lock.
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