LR Questions for CAT: Crack Blood Relations in 3 Steps

DILR

Blood relation questions look like the easiest marks in the whole DILR section. One short paragraph, three or four names, a single question at the end. No table to build, no chart to read, nothing that looks like it needs a strategy.

That reputation is exactly why strong solvers lose marks on them. Among LR questions for CAT, blood relation puzzles quietly punish anyone who tries to hold three generations of a family in their head instead of putting them on paper first. The fix is one habit: map every relation before you touch the question. This guide builds that habit through a repeatable method and three solved puzzles, from one simple clue to a six person family tree.

Why Blood Relation Questions Trip Up Strong CAT Solvers

The paradox is real. Ask a topper which LR question type worries them least, and blood relations often top the list. Ask the same topper which type cost a silly mistake in a recent mock, and the same topic reappears.

The reason is not difficulty. It is working memory. A blood relation clue rarely gives the answer directly. It gives three or four linked statements, and your brain tries to resolve all of them in real time instead of writing anything down. That works for two statements, and fails on the third.

Because the question looks short, most solvers do not budget real time for it. They read once and guess. On a coded relation or a three generation family, that guess is wrong far more often than it should be.

None of this means blood relation puzzles are hard. It means they are the one LR question type where reading fast is the wrong instinct. The fix is a habit, not a talent, resting on two ideas that do almost all the work in this chapter.

Generation Mapping: Reading a Family in Layers

Every blood relation puzzle describes people across generations: grandparents, parents, the narrator's own generation, and sometimes children. Generation mapping means placing each person on the correct horizontal layer the moment they appear, before working out how they connect sideways. Get the layer right first. The exact relationship almost always follows once the layers are fixed.

This single habit prevents the most common failure mode on this question type: solving for a sibling when the answer is actually a cousin, because both looked the same in your head until you separated them by generation on paper.

Direct Relations vs Coded Relations

A direct relation states the connection in plain words: father, aunt, brother-in-law. A coded relation replaces those words with symbols, and asks you to decode the relationship before you start mapping generations. CAT DILR sets use both, sometimes in the same puzzle.

Symbol Notation: The Shorthand That Actually Saves Time

Writing "is the mother of" four times in a margin is slower than the exam allows. A short, consistent symbol set fixes that, whether the puzzle is stated directly or hidden behind a coded operator you have to decode first.

• A horizontal line between two names marks a married couple.
• A downward arrow from one name to another marks parent to child.
• M or F written beside a name marks gender, once the puzzle actually states it.
• A short tick between two names on the same layer marks siblings.
• A boxed letter beside a name marks a coded operator you have already decoded, so you never re read the original definition twice.

None of this needs to be elegant. It needs to be fast and consistent, so that when you glance back at your own diagram thirty seconds later, you can still read it without re deriving anything. Pick your own symbols if these do not feel natural, but pick them once, before the exam, and use the same set on every practice set from that point on.

Term	What It Actually Means	Where Solvers Slip
Sister-in-law	Either your spouse's sister or your brother's wife	Two different people, same label
Cousin	Child of your parent's sibling	Gender and generation are not implied by the word alone
Only son or daughter	That parent has exactly one child of that gender, not one child overall	Do not assume no siblings of the other gender
Nephew	Your sibling's son, or your spouse's sibling's son	Confirm which side of the family before you place him

The Generation Map Method: 3 Steps to Solve Any Blood Relation Puzzle

Every blood relation puzzle, direct or coded, collapses into the same three moves. Learn them once, and the puzzle stops being a separate skill for every new question. It becomes the same three step routine applied to a new set of names.

Try It: A Direct Relation Chain

Here is the method on the simplest version of this puzzle type, before it gets layered with codes or extra generations. Pointing to a photograph, Rohan says, "She is the daughter of my grandfather's only son." How is the girl related to Rohan?

1. Anchor Rohan on the middle generation, with his grandfather one layer above.
2. His grandfather's only son is Rohan's own father, since no other son exists to confuse the layer.
3. The daughter of Rohan's father sits on Rohan's own generation, one layer below the grandfather.
4. Trace back: that daughter's father is Rohan's father, which places her as Rohan's sibling.

Answer: Sister. The whole puzzle collapses once "only son" is read as a generation clue instead of a detail to skim past. Notice that the diagram took longer to draw than the guess would have, and still finished faster, because the guess would have needed a second read to check itself.

Worked Example 1: A Coded Blood Relation Puzzle

CAT occasionally replaces relation words with invented symbols instead of stating them in plain English. The underlying logic does not change at all. Only a decoding step is added at the very start, before you can begin mapping generations the way you already do for direct relations.

Suppose "A % B" means A is the father of B, "A @ B" means A is the brother of B, "A + B" means A is the mother of B, and "A x B" means A is the sister of B. Read all four definitions before touching the puzzle itself. If P % Q @ R + S, how is P related to S?

1. Decode the operators first: % is father, @ is brother, + is mother.
2. P % Q: P is Q's father.
3. Q @ R: Q is R's brother, which means R is also P's child.
4. R + S: R is S's mother, so S is R's child.
5. Trace backward from S: S's mother is R, and R's father is P.

Answer: P is the grandfather of S. Notice the sister operator was defined but never used in this chain. CAT often defines more codes than one question needs, and decoding all of them upfront is still faster.

Worked Example 2: A Multi Generation Family Tree

This is the version that actually decides marks in a real DILR set. It is not one clue but six, and the clues only resolve in order, so a solver who reads them once and tries to hold the whole tree in memory will lose the thread by the third statement. Draw as you read, one line at a time. A family of six has exactly two married couples. Arjun is the father of Rohit. Meera is the mother-in-law of Priya. Rohit is the father of Kabir. Aisha is the daughter of Priya. Kabir is the brother of Aisha. How is Meera related to Aisha?

1. Meera is Priya's mother-in-law, so Priya is married to Meera's son.
2. Arjun is Rohit's father, and Arjun and Meera form the first married couple, so Rohit is Meera's son.
3. Priya is therefore married to Rohit, forming the second couple in the family.
4. Aisha is Priya's daughter, and since Priya's husband is Rohit, Aisha is Rohit and Priya's daughter.
5. Trace back: Aisha's father is Rohit, and Rohit's mother is Meera.

Answer: Meera is Aisha's grandmother. This is exactly the puzzle type where solvers who skip diagramming lose the thread, because the mother-in-law clue only makes sense once the first couple is anchored correctly. Notice that the order of the clues in the paragraph is not the order you need to use them in. Anchoring the married couples before touching the children is what makes the rest of the tree fall into place quickly.

Common Traps in LR Questions for CAT That Cost Marks

Three mistakes cause most wrong answers here, and none are about logic. They are assumptions solvers make without noticing, the kind the first sixty seconds of a DILR set should catch.

The Gender Assumption Trap

CAT rarely states gender for every name. A cousin or child is not automatically male or female, and assuming one costs the answer the moment it matters.

• Words like parent, child, cousin, and sibling do not reveal gender on their own.
• Only assign gender once a title, pronoun, or relation word actually confirms it.

The Only Child Assumption Trap

"Only son" and "only child" are not the same clue, though they read almost identically under time pressure. Read the exact word on the page, not the word you expect to see.

• "Only son" rules out other sons, not daughters.
• "Only child" rules out every sibling, regardless of gender.

The In-Law Ambiguity Trap

Sister-in-law and brother-in-law can each mean two different relationships. Never place an in-law on the diagram until you have confirmed whose spouse or whose sibling they are.

• Sister-in-law: either your spouse's sister, or your brother's wife.
• Confirm the side of the family before you add the symbol.

Once these traps are under control, sort remaining LR practice by difficulty, not set type, and run the habit on previous year CAT DILR questions you have never seen.

Blood relations are a small chapter with an outsized effect on DILR accuracy, one most aspirants underrate while deciding which DILR sets to attempt before CAT 2026. Once the Generation Map Method is automatic, a proper CAT preparation strategy review will tell you if relation puzzles are a real gap or a solved one.