Hello Everyone,
This is the second part of the series for CAT Tricks. The first was on Quant. I will repeat one point from the previous part:
A particular strategy/trick, if worked for me, may not necessarily work for you.
Series 2— VARC Tricks and Tips:
The focus here is only on certain aspects and not on the entire section. VARC is one of my favourite sections to talk about, because as an engineer, I know the pain :P
And this is special for another reason — I made significant improvement in this. A few quick pointers:
A. Your target should be to attempt as much as you can because from what I learnt, VARC will most likely not yield great accuracy for a lot of us. And if one question takes too long for you to answer, chances are anyway high that it will be incorrect
B. Start with the book — “How to read better and faster” and complete it properly. Start reading newspapers, at least the editorial section of something like The Hindu. I preferred the Economic Times. And when you read — try reading as fast as you can while still being able to understand
C. There are some defined subjects from which comprehensions mostly come like Technology, Psychology, History, Political History, Philosophy, Literature etc. No comprehension is actually tough. It is the subject knowledge that creates the difference. I realized that I was easily understanding and solving psychology and technology-related RCs but was finding it difficult to deal with philosophy ones
D. You will also have to figure out through mocks, what is your strength and weakness and based on that start working on it. For example, I started reading some of the popular philosophical concepts, some terms that repeatedly came up in the mocks. I even tried a book. If you are starting your prep today, you will have good enough time to figure out the weak subjects. Pick up a book on that. Familiarize with it, or maybe google up key concepts
E. For the VA section, confidence to solve will come by practice if you are not getting it correct in the initial few mocks. If your English literature is not very strong, you may find it difficult to solve the jumbled para questions, but trust me — it is all about practice and then identifying that underlying thing. May be keep the MCQs at the end(especially jumbled para questions, irrespective of question ordering), but try to attempt everything
F. When you are going good, say you have an easy RC — don’t relax but keep going, extract the extra time. This applies to every section. And this is why it is important to take full mocks.
Feel free to reach out to me on LinkedIn :)