RRB Group D · Bite-size lessons
Relationships
About 6 min · General Intelligence and Reasoning · English
Time worked out from the lesson's 405 words at 150 words a minute, plus a minute for each question.
These questions test your ability to decode relationship statements, construct mental or visual family trees, and identify the relation between two individuals based on given information.
Key ideas
- Generation levels: Organize individuals into horizontal tiers — grandparents at top, parents in middle, children at bottom, grandchildren below that. This prevents confusion when multiple generations are involved.
- Gender determination: Many problems deliberately omit or obscure gender. Use clues like "sister," "mother," "he," "she" to fix gender; when uncertain, use neutral symbols and derive gender from relationships.
- Immediate vs extended family: Immediate family includes parents, siblings, spouse and children. Extended family adds grandparents, aunts, uncles, cousins, in-laws. Know the exact terms: maternal uncle (mother's brother), paternal aunt (father's sister), etc.
- Marriage links: When two families connect through marriage, draw a horizontal line (=) between spouses. Their children branch downward from that line. This helps track in-law relationships.
- "Only" keywords: "Only son" means no other male siblings; "only child" means no siblings at all. These clues constrain the tree and often unlock the solution.
Watch out for
- Gender assumption error: Seeing "X is the child of Y" and assuming X is male without evidence → Always wait for explicit gender clues (brother, sister, he, she) or derive from subsequent relations.
- Confusing in-law sides: Mixing up father-in-law (spouse's father) with one's own father → Remember "in-law" means a relative by marriage: your spouse's family (father-in-law) or your own relative's spouse (son-in-law = daughter's husband), not your blood relative.
- Misreading "only": Reading "my father's only son" and assuming it's someone else when it might be the speaker → If speaker is male and father has only one son, speaker = that son. Track carefully.
Quick reference
- Father's brother = Paternal uncle; Mother's brother = Maternal uncle.
- Spouse's father = Father-in-law; Spouse's brother = Brother-in-law.
- Sibling's son = Nephew; Sibling's daughter = Niece.
- Son's wife = Daughter-in-law; Daughter's husband = Son-in-law.
- Child's child = Grandchild (grandson if male, granddaughter if female).
Check yourself: 3 questions
1. Pointing to a photograph, a woman says, "This man's son's sister is my mother-in-law." How is the woman's husband related to the man in the photograph?
2. A is the brother of B. B is the sister of C. C is the father of D. How is D related to A?
3. Introducing a man, a woman said, "He is the only son of my mother's mother." How is the woman related to the man?
This lesson is cut from the topic's note, not rewritten. Fact-checked on 21 Oct 2026: an AI-assisted check of this note against cited sources; the errors it found were corrected that day. Some errors may remain. The questions are from Shishya's validated question bank.
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