Tier 1 syllabus, topic by topic

The official syllabus is one long paragraph. Here it is sorted into groups, with the chapters of this course that cover each group.

Numbers and calculation (Chapters 1 and 2) Whole numbers, decimals and fractions, relationships between numbers, square roots.

Arithmetic (Chapters 3 to 10) Percentage, ratio and proportion, averages, interest, profit and loss, discount, partnership business, mixture and alligation, time and distance, time and work.

Algebra (Chapter 11, with surds also in Chapter 2 and graphs in Chapter 17) Basic algebraic identities of school algebra, elementary surds, graphs of linear equations.

Geometry (Chapter 12) Triangles and their different centres, congruence and similarity of triangles, circles and their chords, tangents, angles subtended by chords, common tangents to two or more circles.

Mensuration (Chapters 13 and 14) 2D: triangle, quadrilaterals, regular polygons, circle. 3D: right prism, right circular cone, right circular cylinder, sphere, hemisphere, rectangular parallelepiped (cuboid), regular right pyramid with a triangular or square base.

Trigonometry (Chapters 15 and 16) Trigonometric ratios, degree and radian measure, standard identities, complementary angles, heights and distances.

Data (Chapter 18) Histogram, frequency polygon, bar diagram and pie chart.

Key Point: The Tier 1 syllabus just says "interest". That includes compound interest. CI came regularly in 2025 (32 questions across the 48 shifts), so prepare both simple and compound interest.

What Tier 2 adds

The Tier 2 Mathematical Abilities syllabus repeats the Tier 1 list almost word for word and adds one more group:

Statistics and probability (Chapters 18, 19 and 20)

  • Use of tables and graphs: histogram, frequency polygon, bar diagram, pie chart
  • Mean, median, mode and standard deviation
  • Calculation of simple probabilities

Two smaller differences: Tier 2 names simple and compound interest separately, and it says heights and distances will be "simple problems only".

So Chapters 19 and 20 are for Tier 2 only. Everything else in this course counts for both tiers.

What level to expect

Everything in the syllabus is school maths up to Class 10. There is no calculus, no matrices, nothing from Class 11 or 12. What makes SSC Maths hard is not new ideas but three other things:

  • Speed. 36 seconds a question in Tier 1.
  • Twists. A simple idea asked in an unusual way, like a percentage question hidden inside a story about the population of a town.
  • Calculation load. Numbers chosen so that the long method is slow and the smart method is quick.

Tier 2 questions are usually a step tougher than Tier 1: fewer one-step questions and more that join two ideas, such as a mensuration question that first needs a geometry fact.

If a topic feels rusty, don't worry. The concept notes in each chapter start from the basics, and Gyanghar's Class 10 Maths chapters cover trigonometry, coordinate geometry, statistics and probability in full if you want to go slower.