In a group of persons travelling in a bus, 6 persons can speak Tamil, 15 can speak Hindi and 6 can speak Gujarati. In that group none can speak any other language. If 2 persons in the group can speak two languages and one person can speak all the three la

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Q: 145 (IAS/1997)
In a group of persons travelling in a bus, 6 persons can speak Tamil, 15 can speak Hindi and 6 can speak Gujarati. In that group none can speak any other language. If 2 persons in the group can speak two languages and one person can speak all the three languages, then how many persons are there in the group ?

question_subject: 

Logic/Reasoning

question_exam: 

IAS

stats: 

0,5,15,3,6,6,5

keywords: 

{'tamil': [0, 1, 2, 0], 'many persons': [0, 1, 0, 0], 'languages': [0, 0, 1, 1], 'hindi': [7, 7, 4, 13], 'bus': [0, 0, 1, 1], 'persons': [4, 4, 9, 10], 'gujarati': [0, 1, 1, 1], 'other language': [0, 1, 0, 0], 'group': [0, 1, 0, 0], 'group none': [0, 1, 0, 0]}

The question states that there are persons who can speak Tamil, Hindi, and Gujarati, and some of them can speak two languages or all three languages. The best way to approach this is to add up all the language speakers and then subtract the overlap to prevent counting one person multiple times.

First, we add up all the language speakers: 6 (Tamil) + 15 (Hindi) + 6 (Gujarati) = 27 persons.

Then, we subtract those who can speak two languages. According to the question, there are 2 such persons, so the total now becomes 27 - 2 = 25 persons.

Lastly, we subtract the person who can speak all three languages, so the total finally becomes 25 - 1 = 24 persons.

Therefore, the correct answer is 24 as option 4 suggests. This is because those who can speak two or more languages were initially counted multiple times in the total.