Tier-I · 30 Sep to 10 Oct 2026
SSC CGL 2026 Tier-I: what 9 shifts asked
We sorted all 900 questions from 9 shifts by topic, one by one. Here is what keeps coming back, and what to prepare if your shift is still to come (the Tier-I window runs till 30 October).
What repeats
Six patterns across the 9 shifts
Reasoning is turning into reading
54 of 225 Reasoning questions (about 1 in 4) were statement-based: assumptions, inferences, arguments, course of action and syllogisms. Every shift had them, about 6 each.
New clerk-style questions
35 questions in 8 of 9 shifts: match an address or a record exactly, letter matrices (row and column codes), choose a candidate from selection criteria, and situation-response questions.
Economy beat History in GK
29 economy questions against 24 on history. The 1991 economic reforms (and the licence raj before them) came up in 8 of 9 shifts; Five-Year Plans in 7 of 9.
Culture, state by state
21 questions in 7 shifts on folk dances, music and festivals by state, and 11 on monuments and architecture. Rajasthan alone came up 6 times.
Maths: solids and circles
11 questions on prisms and pyramids (5 shifts), 15 on circle tangents and chords (8 shifts), and 10 on mean, median and histograms (4 shifts).
English: narration everywhere
Direct and indirect speech in all 9 shifts (23 questions), a 5-blank cloze passage in 7 of 9, and hard words: jejune, asperity, obstreperous, nugatory.
Section by section
Where the 900 questions went
General Intelligence & Reasoning (225)
| Topic | Questions | Per shift |
|---|---|---|
| Non-verbal figures (series, mirror, folding, counting, cubes) | 45 | 5.0 |
| Statements: assumptions, inferences, arguments, course of action | 39 | 4.3 |
| Clerk-style: matching, matrices, selection criteria, situations | 35 | 3.9 |
| Series and missing numbers | 18 | 2.0 |
| Coding-decoding | 17 | 1.9 |
| Syllogisms and inequalities | 15 | 1.7 |
| Mathematical operations | 14 | 1.6 |
| Analogy and odd one out | 13 | 1.4 |
| Blood relations | 10 | 1.1 |
| Direction, distance and ranking | 7 | 0.8 |
| Seating and puzzles | 6 | 0.7 |
| Arithmetic and calendar | 6 | 0.7 |
General Awareness (225)
| Topic | Questions | Per shift |
|---|---|---|
| Polity (Articles, the President, Parliament, courts) | 36 | 4.0 |
| Art & culture (dances, music, festivals, monuments) | 32 | 3.6 |
| Economy (1991 reforms, Five-Year Plans, national income) | 29 | 3.2 |
| History (ancient, medieval, modern) | 24 | 2.7 |
| Current affairs from 2026 | 24 | 2.7 |
| Sports (rules, trophies, hosts, players) | 18 | 2.0 |
| Geography | 17 | 1.9 |
| Physics | 8 | 0.9 |
| BRICS, BIMSTEC, IMEC, QUAD and other groupings | 8 | 0.9 |
| Books and awards | 7 | 0.8 |
| Space, defence and environment | 10 | 1.1 |
| Schemes, biology, chemistry and other | 12 | 1.3 |
41 of the 225 GK questions came as "consider the following statements", match-the-pairs or chronology questions, in every shift. Current affairs were uneven: three shifts had none, others had up to six, mostly on events from April to July 2026.
Quantitative Aptitude (225, approximate)
- Mensuration, about 3.5 a shift: right prisms (triangular, pentagonal, hexagonal bases) and pyramids far more than before, plus cones, spheres and melting-recasting.
- Geometry, about 3: circles (common tangents, chords, angles in a segment) nearly every shift; triangles, quadrilaterals and polygons.
- Trigonometry, about 2.5: identities and values; heights and distances in 3 shifts.
- Algebra and simplification, about 4: a + 1/a powers, cubes, surds.
- Data, about 2.5: pie charts, bar graphs and tables, and statistics (mean, median, mode, histograms).
- Arithmetic, about 9: profit and loss, successive discounts, interest, ratio and partnership, time and work, speed (boats and trains), mixtures, averages.
English Comprehension (225, approximate)
- Vocabulary, about 8 a shift: synonyms, antonyms, idioms, one-word substitution and spelling, with hard words.
- Cloze passage: 5 blanks in 7 of 9 shifts; a reading passage in the other shifts.
- Narration, about 2.5 and voice, about 2: both directions, often indirect to direct.
- Rearrangement, about 3: jumbled sentences, often with fixed first and last sentences.
- Error spotting and improvement, about 2. New: "which tense is used" and "the grammatical function of this phrase".
Shift still to come?
What to prepare first
- ReasoningStatement and assumption, inference, argument and course-of-action questions; syllogisms; then the clerk-style ones: exact address or record matching, letter matrices, selection criteria.
- General AwarenessThe 1991 reforms and Five-Year Plans; the President's powers and the key Articles; dances, music and festivals state by state (Rajasthan first); current affairs from January to July 2026.
- MathsPrisms and pyramids (volume and surface area), circle tangents and chords, mean and median, successive discounts.
- EnglishIndirect-to-direct narration, active and passive voice, and a cloze passage a day with the hard words you meet.
How we did this
Method
We used the memory-based papers of 9 shifts (30 September to 10 October 2026) that coaching institutes published after each shift, and sorted every question by topic ourselves. Memory-based papers can miss a question or word one differently, so read the counts as a strong guide, not an official breakdown. We don't reproduce the questions here. For the official pattern, see the notice on ssc.gov.in.