Alphabet Test
About 7 min · Logical Reasoning · English
Time worked out from the lesson's 473 words at 150 words a minute, plus a minute for each question.
The Alphabet Test is a core Logical Reasoning topic in SOF NSO that tests your ability to work with the English alphabet's structure and positional logic. Questions typically ask you to find the position of a letter from the left or right, calculate distances between letters, identify letters after rearrangement (reverse order), or decode patterns based on alphabetical positions.
Key ideas
- Original Alphabet Positions: The English alphabet has 26 letters. A is at position 1, Z is at position 26. Knowing at least positions of A (1), E (5), J (10), O (15), T (20), Z (26) by heart saves time.
- Left and Right Positions: "Position from left" means counting A, B, C… forward. "Position from right" means counting Z, Y, X… backward. The same letter has two different positions depending on the direction.
- Complementary Position Rule: If a letter is at position n from the left, its position from the right is 27 − n. This is the most important formula for this topic.
- Reverse Alphabet: When the alphabet is written in reverse (Z, Y, X…, A), the letter at position n from the left in the original alphabet moves to position 27 − n from the left in the reversed alphabet.
- Letter Distance: The distance between two letters is the absolute difference of their positions plus one if counting inclusively, or just the absolute difference if counting gaps.
Watch out for
- Confusing left and right: Students count from the left when the question asks "from the right." Always underline the direction word in the question. → Fix: Use the formula 27 − n immediately when you see "from right."
- Off-by-one errors in distance: Counting "letters between D and G" (exclusive) vs "letters from D to G" (inclusive) gives different answers. → Fix: Read carefully—"between" excludes endpoints; "from…to" includes them.
- Forgetting reverse alphabet logic: Students apply the position-from-right formula when the question says "alphabet written in reverse order." These are different concepts. → Fix: Reverse order changes which letter occupies a position; position-from-right is just counting direction.
Quick reference
- Position from right = 27 − position from left (most frequent formula)
- Reverse alphabet at position n from left = letter originally at 27 − n
- Memorize: A=1, E=5, J=10, M=13, N=14, O=15, T=20, Z=26
- Distance between positions p and q = |p − q| (gaps) or |p − q| + 1 (inclusive)
- Middle pair is M (13) and N (14)—use to split alphabet mentally
Check yourself: 3 questions
1. How many letters are there in the English alphabet between the 5th letter from the left and the 8th letter from the right?
2. In the English alphabet, if every alternate letter starting from A is deleted, which letter will be exactly in the middle of the remaining letters?
3. Which letter is as far from G in the alphabet as T is from M?
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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