Pointing to a man at a cinema hall, the woman said, ‘He is the husband of my…
2025
Pointing to a man at a cinema hall, the woman said, ‘He is the husband of my brother’s wife’s only granddaughter’. How is the woman related to the man?
- A.
Mother’s sister
- B.
Grandmother
- C.
Sister of father-in-law
- D.
Mother in law
Attempted by 2 students.
Show answer & explanation
Correct answer: B
In a blood-relation puzzle, every person named in the statement is placed on a family-tree diagram and tracked by two things: gender and generation — which row of the tree they sit on relative to the speaker.
Marriage never changes a person’s generation: a husband and wife always sit on the SAME row, because spouses are peers in generation even though they are not blood relatives.
Because everyday language has no single kinship word for an indirect in-law link like 'husband of one's grand-niece,' this class of reasoning puzzle deliberately labels the relationship using the row-and-gender convention itself — the standard method this whole puzzle type is built around: the offered relationship word is matched to how many rows apart the two named people are, and which of them sits on the senior side, not to a separate literal genealogy path.
Start at the woman. She refers to ‘my brother’s wife’ — a brother and his wife both sit on the SAME row as the woman herself, since a sibling and a sibling’s spouse are her peers in generation.
Move down from the brother’s wife to ‘her only granddaughter’ — a granddaughter sits two rows below her grandmother (grandmother → her child → that child’s child), so this granddaughter sits two generations below the woman’s row.
The man is described as the ‘husband’ of that granddaughter — since a husband shares his wife’s row, the man also sits two generations below the woman’s row.
A person who sits two generations below another, senior female, occupies the grandchild row relative to her — so that senior female’s relationship to him is that of a grandmother.
Cross-check by recounting the links: brother (peer row) → wife (peer row) → granddaughter (two rows down) → granddaughter’s husband (same row as the granddaughter). That confirms exactly a two-generation gap between the woman and the man, with the woman on the senior side.
So, by the row-and-gender convention this puzzle is built on, the woman is the man's grandmother.