Mathematical Operations Questions with Solutions

These questions hand you a fake rulebook — "+ means ÷", "− means ×" — and ask you to compute an expression using the swapped meanings. The trick is purely mechanical: substitute carefully, then apply the normal order of operations. Here’s the approach, four fully worked examples sharing one symbol key, and a few to try yourself.

The approach, quickly

• First, rewrite the whole expression substituting every symbol with its NEW meaning — do this as one clean pass before calculating anything, so you don’t re-read the swapped meaning mid-calculation and make an error.
• Once substituted, solve using the normal order of operations: multiplication and division first (left to right), then addition and subtraction (left to right) — exactly like Simplification/BODMAS.
• Multiplication and division rank equally with each other, and addition and subtraction rank equally with each other — neither one in a pair automatically goes before the other.
• Double-check your substitution against the key once more before calculating — mixing up which symbol maps to which is the single most common mistake here, not the arithmetic itself.

Worked examples

Try these yourself

Substitute using the same key, apply the order of operations, then check against the answer.

Where this comes up

Mathematical Operations (symbol substitution) is a regular topic in the Reasoning/General Intelligence section of every exam Pariksha Saathi covers — SSC CGL, SSC MTS, SSC CHSL, IBPS PO, IBPS Clerk, SBI PO and SBI Clerk.

Practice more Mathematical Operations questions

This page covers the approach and a handful of worked examples. Pariksha Saathi has full topic-wise practice sets for Mathematical Operations (and every other Reasoning/Quant/English topic) with instant scoring and explanations — free, no account required.