What is your CAT VARC strategy to aim for 99 percentile? Let’s help you understand how to solve this section to score higher.
Assuming this year CAT will be of 2 hours, and hence there will be 16 questions on RC, which is 70% of the total VARC questions. This is a section which checks your comprehension the most, and not the vocabulary or the grammar. First step towards comprehension is how you can retain what you have read. Best way to exercise your mind is to start reading articles from reputed newspapers and summarise it in your mind. you can start reading English newspapers like The Hindu or Economic Times, or online articles on Aeon or Al-daily to get used to reading long passages. But for your rescue I have provided multiple Genre wise articles from thosesources from where CAT has been giving RCs in recent years with Summary. People who read a lot of novels or just like reading in general will have a head-start in this section, but with some dedicated reading practice, you can cover this gap in a few months.
Sowhat should be your CAT VARC strategy to improve this section?
Read 1 to 2 articles from the
250 Genre wise Reading Articles by iQuanta. You will get them here: https://www.iQuanta.in/test/iconcept, Check Reading Materials Section there.
All you have to do is read daily 1 article at least, from any genre you want get comfortable with. Practice 3 RCs per day, for which you can use Past CAT RCs or you can do it from iQuanta CAT Course, VARC Section.
At the end of 2 months, you will be able to retain the majority of points from the article, and that if complemented with past papers, practice is well and good.
How To Approach a Passage?
I will suggest to follow the most conventional approach i.e. I always read the whole passage before looking at the questions. Some people read the first couple of paragraphs and then simultaneously start solving the questions. Others also first look at all the questions and then start reading the passage. For yourself, you can try all these 3 methods in the mocks and choose the one which suits you best. The most important step is absorbing and understanding what you read. Many times, when the passage is long, you’ll find after reading half the text that you’ve already forgotten everything and need to start again. This wastes a lot of time. Even while attempting the questions, you can’t revisit the whole paragraph every time. To overcome this issue, you can note down the important highlights of the paragraph while reading. This will help formulate a better structure of the content in your head and help you recall which point is mentioned where. Although, this method is advisable only in the early part of preparation. As you get used to reading and retaining long paragraphs, you will no longer need this trick.
How to attempt the questions?
There will be a few easy questions in which you can directly pick the correct option by reading the paragraph. Other than that, most questions in RC are very confusing with similar looking options. The first rule for solving such questions is that you leave all assumptions behind. The topic of the RC might be familiar to you, but you have to disregard everything you know while reading it. Whatever the author writes, is the truth and you’ve to follow that only.
Always read the question very carefully. For example, consider the following paragraph:
There are many of us who would choose Lakshay as the answer because we are in a hurry and careless. But we made this assumption that we are only considering only these 4 friends and not the entire class. So the answer is None of these. These kinds of mistakes have a very negative impact on your score. So always make sure you understand what the question is asking.
Now, the most reliable way to solve the RC questions, in my opinion, is the method of elimination. In most questions you’ll be able to eliminate two options and be left with two.
In these cases, I’d suggest you always go with your gut feeling and decide one of the two options. Another important point here is that during analysis of such questions, do read the explanation behind the answer irrespective of the fact whether you got it right or wrong. If the other option, which you had not eliminated is the correct answer, then you were at-least half-correct and you can take some confidence from it. But, if you eliminated the right answer at the beginning itself, then you are either not reading the question carefully or not understanding the passage completely or both. If this happens frequently, then you need to keep working on your reading skills.
If you’re scoring low in RCs, then don’t worry too much right now. You’ve time to get used to it and you’ll improve only with practice. There is no shortcut which will suddenly increase your marks in tests. I can’t stress enough how important it is to read the question and the explanation of the answer carefully; the latter step is obviously your analysis part. For practice, you can again follow any test series of your choice and also give sectional tests.
What has iQuanta CAT 2022 Course to offer for VARC: We will have 32 Application Sessions in VARC. 20 of the sessions are focussed on RCs. Apart from that there will be 20 Conceptual Live sessions.
In Each Application RC Session we do 4 or 5 Reading Comprehension passages with 2-3 detailed video solution ( 20 minutes each) and 2 detailed textual solution. This happens along with instant doubt clarifications in the class.
We also have regular practise sessions on RCs. Special focus in RC is on elimination of incorrect options.
[In case you want all RCs to practice at once, you can opt for iQuanta IIM ABC Course, which has 500 RC Sets with detailed solutions.]
VA – 12 Sessions on VA with more than 60 videos in CAT Course. This is complemented by 100s of practice questions on VA along with explanation and doubt clarifications.
3-4 months of rigorous practise is followed by Mocks and Practice sessions. 15 mocks brings us to a total of 75 RCS in addition to 50 RCs in sectional test.
The Crash Course (which is free for full course students) – we focus on VA and RCs again with enhanced speed. We will have 30 Video passages, along with 25 RCS.
In the span of 2 months in the crash course – we cover 75 more RCs. We also have RC initiative by iQuanta, where we create the best quality original RC sets. In total, we will cover 260+ RCs and around 500 VA Questions in class.
Final Tip for CAT VARC: Try and read for 30-45 minutes. It can be articles, newspapers, etc. After some time when you feel comfortable, start with the past CAT RC practice, which along with the iQuanta Explanatory RC Videos and rigorous practice will be enough to fine tune, and enhance your comprehension which if done well can easily get you a 99%le in CAT 2022.
All this comes with a 24*7 doubt solving assistance.The important part is to start now.
All these are included in CAT 2022 Full Course by iQuanta, you can be a part atwww.iQuanta.in.The last CAT Batch of iQuanta is starting post coming week.
