Logical Reasoning: Tricks to solve Coding-Decoding Questions

Coding-Decoding is an integral part of the Logical Reasoning section in many competitive exams like Banking, SSC, etc. It basically judges the candidate’s ability to decipher the code language. In each question of this topic, a word and a coded form of the word will be given. Students are required to decode the logic behind this coding and then apply the same logic to another given word for finding the answer in the form of a code.

Meaning

In simple words, Coding is the process of converting a word into another language by using letters and numbers while Decoding is to convert the coded value back into the normal language.

Learn tricks to solve Alphabet Test

Usage of Alphabetical Order

English alphabets and their corresponding number values help the candidate to increase the performance in this area. The position of the letter in the English Alphabet is considered to be the value of the alphabet in questions on letter series. While attempting the letter series the students must memorise the corresponding value of each alphabet through different techniques.

EJOTY Technique

The EJOTY Technique is very helpful in finding the position of the alphabet as:

For example, if you want to find the position of the alphabet ‘S’, then as we know that ‘T’ is 20, so ‘S’ is 20 - 1 = 19.

Position of an Alphabet from the End

Also, you can find the position of an alphabet from the end by subtracting its value from 27. For example, the position of D from the end is 27 – 4 = 23.

The above pattern is very useful to find many types of question in Alphabet Series when we write the last 13 alphabets in front of the first 13 alphabets of the English.

Learn tricks to solve Puzzle Test

Types of Coding-Decoding Questions

The questions on coding and decoding are basically of three types as given below:

Example: In a certain code ‘SHIMLA’ is written as ‘RGHLKZ, how will PATNA be coded then?

Solution:         Each letter is coded as the letter previous to it, i.e.

S = R, H = G, I = H, M = L, L = K, A = Z.

PATNA will be coded as OZSMZ.

Example: DAZE is written as 41265 in a certain code. How will BOY be written in the same code?

Solution:         In this question the position of each alphabet is given like

D = 4, A = 1, Z = 26 and E = 5.

So, the code for BOY will be 21525 as B = 2, O = 15 and Y = 25.

Example: In a certain code ‘415’ means ‘milk is hot’; ‘18’ means ‘hot soup’; and ‘895’ means ‘soup is tasty’. What number will indicate the word ‘tasty’?

Solution:         The code for ‘hot’ is 1.

So, the code of ‘soup’ is 8.

Now the code of ‘is’ is 5.

Hence, we can say that the code of ‘tasty’ is 9.        

If you found these tips on ‘Tricks to solve Coding-Decoding’ useful, then do visit www.jagranjosh.com for more such videos on Logical Reasoning.