The verbal ability and reading comprehension section is a big challenge to a lot of CAT aspirants. It is estimated that close to 30-40 per cent of the test-takers are unable to crack CAT because of their inability to handle this section properly. Needless to say, this is one of the critical elements of the CAT exam (and indeed for most other management entrance and aptitude examinations).
Two-pronged preparation
Preparing to do well in VA and RC would essentially mean focusing on two main aspects:
Improving your ability to read and understand language per se.
Improving your ability to solve specific question types.
The first objective obviously is a longer term objective, and hence would require you to put more effort. The minimum timeframe in which you would start to see any significant change for improving your ability to comprehend language would be after 6-12 months of extensive work.
Once you have largely mastered the language, the task is on improvement of your ability to solve specific question types. This should not take you too much time. The focus here has to be on developing your ability to choose the correct answer. Hence you would need to develop the correct thought process for each question type. Once you have these objectives on your preparation radar, you should essentially divide your work on four levels of the language in order to improve both your ability to comprehend as well as your ability to solve:
Word-level ability
Development of language at the word level: Comprises vocabulary development, improving your knowledge of phrasal verbs and improving your knowledge of idioms and phrases.
Development of question solving ability at the word level comprises questions like: antonyms, synonyms, correct/ incorrect word usage, questions testing your knowledge of phrasal verbs and so on.
Sentence-level ability
This is not just the skill to read and comprehend sentences but it also includes the ability to go beyond the sentence and be able to predict what the author is going to move on to next.
You would need to be able to move from understanding short 8-10-12 word sentences on familiar topics to long 20-30 word sentences on unfamiliar topics.
This is imperative because inside most standard quality aptitude exams (like CAT/ XAT) you are likely to encounter language where the average sentence length is between 20-30 words.
Sample this sentence from the CAT 2008 paper:
“Language is complex, specialised skill, which develops in the child spontaneously, without conscious effort or formal instruction, is deployed without awareness of its underlying logic, is qualitatively the same in every individual, and is distinct from more general abilities to process information or behave intelligently.”
This sentence comprises 45 words and is the kind of sentence you are likely to encounter in the examination and not the “cat is sitting on the mat” kind of sentence. Obviously being able to form the visual imagery in order to comprehend such sentences becomes a critical skill while preparing for this section.
Typical question categories at the sentence level include facts, inferences and judgments, sentence completion, sentence corrections.
The next two categories are: Paragraph level comprehension and Passage level comprehension.
Both the above are a function of your ability to understand sentences — since a paragraph is effectively a collection of sentences while a passage is nothing but a collection of paragraphs.
Thus, once you master the ability to read and comprehend sentences quickly, it is the stepping stone for tackling paragraph-level and passage-level comprehension.
Reading and understanding paragraphs and passages is therefore a logical extension of being able to read long sentences on complex issues.
The key question types under these categories are:
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