Strategy for reading comprehension
Hi All I am new to this forum and glad to see so many serious members discussing about CAT and only CAT. This is going to be my second CAT attempt and last year I got more than 99 in both maths and DI section but a shocking 43 percentile in English Section. This year I am mainly concentrating on improving my score in English as I am quite confident about the other two sections. Till Now my strategy in RC is to go through the passage for few seconds esp. the first paragraph then give a good look at the questions and try to understand (not answer) it. Sometimes I get 5/5 correct and sometimes 1-2/5. I tried other methods like reading the RC first without worrying about the question but that never made any difference. I know my grammar is not that strong but I am quite good in vocabulary (have done a lot of hard work in improving this in last couple of years). So my main score are should be reading comprehension but some how I am missing the trick to master it. I never face any problem while answering small passages (1 paragraph and 1 question) where my accuracy level remains more than 80% but it’s only the RC where I always falter. Any suggestion what else I should try?
well ! i gave gre and i had
well ! i gave gre and i had a very strong RC ability (hope i still have it !!!! ), igave cat a year back and had 99 %ile. my suggesion would be ! 1. never make any inferences on your own as a rule please.be hard core objective. what is being asked is right there in the passage. also remember that if you have to then be absolutely sure that you arn't commiting any fallacies. eg. all x are y doesent imply all y are x. not that you will come accross such issues but i hope you get the point. i have fallen prey to this a lot of times , sometimes i get confident when i kno the subject of the passage and such mistakes creep in. 2. try to read the passage once slowly(normal speed that is ! ) so that you can grasp the matter. no point reading at express speed if you dont understand every line. take a pen (i do that even on the exam) and just note the theme of each paragraph while you are first reading it. just a little note , maybe a word or two. underline words or lines which you think are important. that way when you look at the questions you would know where to find the answer because by then would would have known the passage in and out. 3. finally, take up gre Barrons and kaplans book and solve all the RC there. these passages are slightly diffenent from cat , tougher i would say, and once you become great at them Cat RC's will be a cake walk. I had studied for my GRe ONLY, just went to the CAT exams and creamed it without prep , beleve me. 4. try for passages which have greater marks so that you get full compensation for your time on the exam. 5. improve your grammar for certain, because they will bail you out in case you end up taking a lot of time for RC