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Caselet Data Interpretation: From Paragraph to Table

Spot the grid • Fill fixed numbers first • Use differences and ratios • Check the totals

Banking 📅 Last updated: 2026-10-24

A caselet gives the data as a paragraph instead of a chart or table. In bank prelims and mains it usually supports a set of four or five questions. The arithmetic is no harder than in other DI sets; the difficulty is organising the information. The reliable method is to turn the paragraph into a table before reading any question.

Here is an invented practice caselet:

A company has 300 employees in three departments: Sales, HR and Tech. 40% of the employees work in Tech, and HR has 40 fewer employees than Sales. 40% of all employees are women. One-quarter of the Tech staff are women, and in HR the ratio of women to men is 3 : 2.

Read the paragraph once, only to find the two dimensions. Here they are department (Sales, HR, Tech) and gender (women, men). Draw a grid with a total row and a total column, and put the overall total, 300, in the corner.

DepartmentWomenMenTotal
Sales
HR
Tech
Total300

Now take the clues in the order that fixes numbers, not the order they appear in. Clues that are a percentage of a known total come first; clues that compare two unknowns come after.

Step 2a: Tech

40% of 300 work in Tech: 40 ÷ 100 × 300 = 120.

Step 2b: Sales from a sum and a difference

Sales and HR together have 300 − 120 = 180, and Sales has 40 more than HR. The larger of two numbers is (sum + difference) ÷ 2 = (180 + 40) ÷ 2 = 110.

Step 2c: HR

HR = 110 − 40 = 70. Check: 110 + 70 + 120 = 300.

Step 3a: total women

40% of 300 are women, so the women column totals 120 and the men column totals 180.

Step 3b: HR from a ratio

HR's 70 staff split 3 : 2, so women are 70 × 3 ÷ 5 = 42 and men are 28.

Tech's women are one-quarter of 120, which is 120 ÷ 4 = 30, leaving 90 men.

Step 3c: the last cell from the total

Sales women are whatever is left of the women's total: 120 − 30 − 42 = 48, so Sales has 62 men.

DepartmentWomenMenTotal
Sales4862110
HR422870
Tech3090120
Total120180300

Always check both directions: the rows add to the totals column and the columns add to the total row. A mismatch means a clue was misread, and it is far cheaper to catch it now than after answering three questions.

Using the table

"What percentage of Sales staff are women?" is now a look-up: 48 ÷ 110 × 100 = 43.64%.

Not every caselet is a two-way grid. Some describe groups that overlap, such as people who read a Hindi paper, an English paper, both or neither. The table for these has four cells: only the first group, only the second, both, and neither.

Worked example: who reads neither?

Of 200 people, 120 read a Hindi paper, 90 read an English paper and 30 read both. Readers of at least one paper = 120 + 90 − 30 = 180, so 20 read neither. "Only Hindi" is 120 − 30 = 90 and "only English" is 90 − 30 = 60.

The trap here is adding 120 and 90 and forgetting that the 30 who read both have been counted twice. Writing the "both" figure into its cell first, and then subtracting it from each group, avoids that.

  • ✘ Answering questions straight from the paragraph and rereading it each time.
  • ✘ Applying a percentage to the wrong total, such as taking "one-quarter of the Tech staff" as a quarter of all employees.
  • ✘ Mixing up "share of the department" with "share of all women".
  • ✘ Not checking that the rows and columns add up.
  1. Find the two dimensions and draw the grid with totals.
  2. Fill clues that are fixed fractions of known totals.
  3. Use sum-and-difference or ratio clues next.
  4. Fill the last cells by subtracting from totals.
  5. Check rows and columns, then answer.

Once the table exists, the questions are ordinary table DI. For the sum-and-difference and ratio steps, see ratio basics; more in bar graph DI and the Quant cheat code.

Q1. Using the caselet's completed table, how many men work in Tech? easy

✅ Answer: (c) 90

💡 Explanation: Tech has 120 employees and one-quarter of them, 30, are women. The rest, 120 − 30 = 90, are men.

Q2. What is the ratio of women in Sales to women in HR? easy

✅ Answer: (a) 8 : 7

💡 Explanation: Sales has 48 women and HR has 42. Dividing both by 6 gives 8 : 7. The ratio 11 : 7 compares the department totals, 110 and 70, instead.

Q3. Men make up what percentage of all 300 employees? easy

✅ Answer: (d) 60%

💡 Explanation: Women are 40% of the company, 120 people, so men are 300 − 120 = 180, which is 180 ÷ 300 × 100 = 60%.

Q4. By how many does the number of men in Tech exceed the number of men in Sales? medium

✅ Answer: (b) 28

💡 Explanation: Tech has 90 men. Sales has 110 employees of whom 48 are women, so 62 men. The difference is 90 − 62 = 28.

Q5. Women in HR are what percentage of all women in the company? medium

✅ Answer: (c) 35%

💡 Explanation: HR has 42 of the company's 120 women. 42 ÷ 120 × 100 = 35%. The 60% figure is HR women as a share of HR, a different question.

Q6. If 20 more men join HR, what percentage of HR's staff will be women? hard

✅ Answer: (a) 46.67%

💡 Explanation: HR grows from 70 to 90 employees while its women stay at 42. 42 ÷ 90 × 100 = 46.67%, down from 60%.

How long should I spend building the table in a caselet?

Building the table usually takes most of the time for the set, but after that each question is a quick look-up. Skipping the table and solving each question from the paragraph is slower and causes more mistakes, because you reread the same lines repeatedly.

What if a caselet's clues cannot be ordered neatly?

Fill every cell that a clue fixes directly, such as a percentage of a known total. Then use totals and differences to fill the rest, and if a cell is still unknown, write it as a variable and use the remaining clue to solve for it.

All problems and solutions on this page are original. No outside facts are relied on; every numeric answer is recomputed by software before publishing.

How this page was prepared. Drafted with AI assistance (Claude (Anthropic AI model)) from the sources listed above. 15 calculations on this page were recomputed by software and matched. Automated checks also covered structure, internal links and duplicate text. Software checks cannot confirm facts. Reviewed by praveenkumar on 2026-10-24 against the sources listed above.

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