Character Puzzles

Character Puzzles Verbal Reasoning questions: Character puzzles, often referred to as letter or alphabet puzzles, are a type of logical reasoning puzzle that involves manipulating or rearranging letters, words, or characters to solve a specific problem or reach a specific pattern or conclusion. These puzzles are designed to test a person’s ability to recognize and apply logical rules or patterns within a set of characters.

Character puzzles – Solved Examples

Example 1: You have five letters: A, B, C, D, and E. You know that:

A is not next to B.

B is next to C.

D is not next to C.

What is the order of the letters from left to right?

Solution:

From the given information, we can deduce that:

B must be next to C.

D cannot be next to C, so it must be next to A or E.

If D is next to A, then B cannot be next to C, which contradicts the given information. Therefore, D must be next to E.

Therefore, the order of the letters from left to right is ABDCE.

Example 2: You have four words: CAT, DOG, RAT, and FOX. You know that:

The first letter of each word is unique.

The second letter of each word is unique.

The third letter of each word is unique.

What is the order of the words from left to right?

Solution:

Since each letter is unique, we can create a table to represent the possible combinations of letters:

First Letter Second Letter Third Letter

C A T

D O G

R A T

F O X

We can eliminate the combinations with repeated letters, such as CAT and RAT. We can also eliminate the combinations with the same second letter, such as CAT and DOG. This leaves us with the following possibilities:

First Letter Second Letter Third Letter

F O X

R A T

The only word that fits the remaining possibilities is FOX. Therefore, the order of the words from left to right is CAT, DOG, RAT, FOX.

Example 3: You have five numbers: 1, 2, 3, 4, and 5. You know that:

The sum of the even numbers is greater than the sum of the odd numbers.

The difference between the largest number and the smallest number is 4.

What are the numbers from smallest to largest?

Solution:

Let’s assume the numbers are arranged from smallest to largest. Since the difference between the largest number and the smallest number is 4, we can deduce that the smallest number is 1 and the largest number is 5.

The sum of the even numbers is greater than the sum of the odd numbers. This means that the sum of 2 and 4 is greater than the sum of 1 and 3. Therefore, the numbers must be 1, 3, 4, 2, 5.

Example 4: You have six coins: three fair coins and three biased coins that always land on tails. You have three chances to flip a coin and determine whether it is fair or biased.

How can you determine whether all three of your coins are fair or whether all three are biased in three flips?

Solution:

Flip two coins at random.

If both coins land on tails, then you know that all three of your coins are biased.

If at least one coin lands on heads, then you know that at least one of your coins is fair.

Flip the remaining coin.

If this coin lands on tails, then you know that two of your coins are biased and one is fair.

If this coin lands on heads, you know that two of your coins are fair and one is biased.

Example 5: You have a bag of 100 marbles, 50 of which are red and 50 of which are blue. You randomly draw two marbles from the bag without replacement.

What is the probability of drawing two red marbles?

Solution:

The probability of drawing a red marble on the first draw is 50/100 = 1/2.

After you draw the first marble, there are only 99 marbles left, and only 49 of them are red. Therefore, the probability of drawing another red marble on the second draw is 49/99 = 1/2.

Therefore, the probability of drawing two red marbles is (1/2) × (1/2) = 1/4.