Coding – Decoding: How to Solve Such Questions

We team Sehpaathi got to know that many of our visitors find too much trouble while solving the Reasoning Section whenever appeared for any banking exams.So, we took an initiative to come up with our new concept i.e. IBPS Special in which we will provide you all necessary shortcuts,concepts, tricks with problems for each topic of Reasoning. So, we are here with the stuff related to “CODING – DECODING”.

Coding-Decoding is a common topic for all competitive exams. We can expect 5 questions from this topic in Reasoning section.It a method of encrypting a message before transmitting it to someone, which no third person can understand without knowing the key.

Easy Tips

Letter positions as per English Alphabet Series: (A=1, B=2, C=3, D=4…….Y=25, Z=26). To learn this, remember a shortcut for the position of letters i.e. EJOTY where E=5, J=10, O=15, T=20 & Y=25)

Letter positions as per reverse English Alphabet Series (A=26, B=25, C=24 …., Z=1)

Corresponding letter of each letter i.e., the pair of letters at the same distance from start and end of the English Alphabet Series (A is opposite to Z; B is opposite to Y, and C is opposite to X and so on) and to learn this one can use different acronyms for e.g. for AZ –> AZar; BY –> BYe; CX–> CruX; DW–>DeW and so on.This topic can be divided in to the following subtopics based on the logic incorporated:

(I) Coding – Decoding by Letter Shifting:

In this method, one or more English words are given with their respective codes. The coding is based on shifting the positions of the individual letters based on their place in the English Alphabet. You have to identify a common pattern and apply the same pattern to the word in the question to find its code or apply the reverse pattern to the given code to find the original word.

(II) Coding Letters of a Word:

In these questions, the letters of one or more words are coded in terms of symbols/digits/other letters. You have to identify the code of the individual letter by comparing and based on this, find out the code for given word.

Points to remember while solving this question:

Compare any two messages bearing a common word
Compare the codes of these two messages to find a common code-word
This common code word will represent the common word in the message
Repeat the same by picking all the possible combinations of common words from messages and thus determining the common code-words
Thus the entire message can be decoded and the codes for individual words can be found

Example 1:

In a certain code ‘MONARCHY’ is written as ‘NPOBSDIZ’. How will ‘STANDARD’ be written in that code?

Solution:

In this question, each letter of ‘MONARCHY’ is simply replaced by its next letter as per English Alphabet.

M + 1 = N;

O + 1 = P;

N + 1 = O;

A + 1 = B;

R + 1 = S;

C + 1 = D;

H + 1 = I;

Y + 1 = Z.

Based on similar pattern, code for ‘STANDARD’ is ‘TUBOEBSE’.

Example 2:

Directions: In a certain code, ‘calendar contains all holidays’ is coded as ‘si ma kc du’; ‘holidays are real fun’ is coded as ‘si vt gs tm’; ‘juice contains real fruit’ is coded as ‘ma ky gs mk’ and ‘fun and fruit calendar’ is coded as ‘ke lm mk ze’.

How will ‘fruit contains real juice’ be coded in this code language?

Solution and Steps Involved:

1) Write down all the statements and their codes one after another.

2) Pick any two statements which have common word(s) and compare their code strings to find out the common codes between them.

3) Highlight common words and common codes in a unique fashion.

In statements 1 and 2, ‘holidays’ is the common word and ‘si’ is the common code, hence, code for ‘holidays’ is ‘si’ which we have highlighted by drawing a box around them.

4) Continue this process until all such cases are exhausted.

From statement 1 and 3, ‘contains’ is the common word and ‘ma’ is the common code, hence, code for ‘contains’ is ‘ma’ which we have circled.

Similarly, we will compare other pair of statements to find out the codes for rest of the words.

Hence,

Code for ‘fruit’ → ‘mk’

Code for ‘calendar’ → ‘ke’

Code for ‘fun’ → ‘tm’

Code for real’ → ‘gs’

Code for ‘juice’ → ‘ky’ (because only ‘juice’ and ‘ky’ is left in statement 3)
Now pick the words asked in the question and their corresponding words to get the final answer.

Hence, code for ‘fruit contains real juice’ is ‘mk ma gs ky’.