A topic every aspirant thinks they can do in their head, and where almost everyone loses a mark. Draw the path on coordinates and the whole thing becomes arithmetic.
Every mistake in this chapter comes from turning left or right in your head instead of on paper.
A left or right turn is always relative to the direction you are currently facing. This is obvious when stated and forgotten the moment a question has four legs.
Notice the pattern: a right turn moves you clockwise round the compass — North, East, South, West — and a left turn moves you anticlockwise. Learn the clockwise order and you never need the table.
North, East, South, West in clockwise order. A right turn moves you one step forward through that phrase; a left turn moves you one step back. Two turns in the same direction always give you the opposite of where you started.
Do not draw a wandering map. Start at the origin and track two running totals: an east–west total and a north–south total. Every leg adjusts exactly one of them.
At the end you have a single point. The distance from the start, the direction from the start, and any "how far north is he now" question all read straight off those two numbers.
If a journey goes 6 km west and later 6 km east, those two cancel completely. Spotting a cancelling pair often collapses a four-leg question into a single addition.
Arjun travels 10 km north from a cafeteria. He turns left and walks 6 km, then turns right and walks 4 km, then turns right and walks 6 km to reach the railway station. What is the distance between the cafeteria and the station?
When the final point is neither directly north nor directly east of the start, the shortest distance is the hypotenuse of a right triangle whose sides are your two running totals.
Exam setters almost always choose numbers from these triples so that the answer is a whole number. If your two totals are not one of them, check your arithmetic before reaching for a square root.
If your totals give an ugly square root, you have almost certainly mis-turned somewhere. Re-run the legs before trusting the answer.
The sun rises in the east and sets in the west, so a shadow always points away from the sun. In the morning shadows fall towards the west; in the evening they fall towards the east.
The question tells you which side of the person the shadow falls on. Match that side to the shadow's compass direction, and the direction the person faces follows immediately.
Fix the sun first, then point the shadow directly opposite. Only after both are fixed do you work out which way the person is facing.
Two different questions get asked at the end of a journey, and they need different information. "Which direction is he facing?" depends only on the turns. "Where is he relative to the start?" depends only on the coordinates.
For relative position, remember the direction is stated from the start to the end point. If the end point has a larger y, it is north of the start. If it also has a larger x, it is north-east.
Read the question twice and decide which of the two it is asking before you compute anything. They very often differ.
Practice covering all five question types, with a printable compass and blank grid space for plotting each journey by hand. Print it, solve it, keep it.
Multiple choice and assertion–reason, building in difficulty. Full solutions are in the downloadable PDF above.
Live classes cover every reasoning, aptitude, English and GK topic straight from the real papers, with the shortcut for each question type drilled until it is automatic.