The biggest dilemma associated with CAT RC is what to read and what not to read and what should be the criteria to judge this. To overcome this one is required to be voracious reader only after spending hours and hours rigorously reading not so amazing set of texts one finds himself in a position where he can grab the required data and discard remaining.. When someone is not trained enough, he tends to spare more time on something which are composed as distracting elements. Unfortunately, not everyone is always up for voracious reading, what with scores of “interesting” substitutes leaving their mark in people’s lives. Fortunately for them, there are ways to strategize reading and then practice the strategy. Instead of starting your prep for the RC section by reading excessively, it might be a healthier alternative to read actively and mindfully instead. Let’s go over how you can do that to get you started:
Create pseudo goals and pseudo stress
Whenever we come across a specific type of problem, we have certain goals in mind (depending, of course, on what that problem type is). Reading Comprehension (RC) is no exception. First, we have some goals regarding time management. I aim to complete an initial read-through of an RC passage in 2 (shorter) to 3 (longer) minutes. I try to answer general questions (e.g., main idea) in about 1 minute and specific questions in about 1.5 to 2 minutes. Then comes the goal regarding the composition of the passage such as: what is the motto or main idea of the author? What is the tone of the author ? What is the style of passage?
Master the Skimming skill
Though supporting information is usually distracting in nature, we need the supporting information from the paragraphs to convey the main idea, however priority should be given to main ideas first only then the supporting hence you will need some specifics minutes to support and convey the supporting information itself. Now, since these specifics are extremely discrete, they are not likely to come up in the questions that follow the passage. Their relevance is limited to giving form to the ideas presented in each paragraph, and because they do not explicitly provide the reader with any relevant ideas of their own, it is wise to skim over them at 5 times the speed used for the supporting ideas.
Making short notes is very helpful and saves your precious time
It is the prime condition that notes should be heavily abbreviated “ much more aggressively abbreviated than notes you would typically take at work or school. In fact, if I look at my notes for a passage a few days later, I should have a lot of trouble figuring out what they say . Though it takes rigorous effort and practice to master the skill of writing in abbreviated form, it’s rewarded handsomely. How can we get away with abbreviating this heavily? Again. You’re going to spend perhaps 6 to 8 minutes with this passage and then you can forget about it forever. You don’t need to commit anything to long-term memory, nor do you need to take notes from which you can study in a week.
Examine the scope of the passage
Scope of writing is the purpose why the author has highlighted the particular topics however it is foolish to expect any explicit information regarding this. He/she may have merely wanted to add to the debate surrounding the theory with a conclusion that was perhaps recently unearthed, and unknown to the scientific community.
Luckily, the non-scientist, he/she will have mentioned this in the discourse, and when you have found it, you’ve found the scope of the passage. While these steps give you pointers about how you need to approach reading in general, remember that individual minds work in individual ways, and thus, every student is likely to find their own reasoning capabilities as they practice over time. There are many advocates of the speed-reading exercise that employs rather unnatural a strategy to forcibly push the mind through more than it can absorb. While some seemed to have benefited from this strategy, some have actually hindered comprehension, and since the whole point of the RC section is assessing comprehension, speed-reading might just be a bane rather than a boon.
Miscellaneous guidelines
It’s expected to have a decent vocabulary. In this passage, we were expected to know analogous and hierarchy. If you run across an unknown word that isn’t otherwise defined, then you are forewarned: learn high frequency vocabulary frequently used in passages before you take the mock test.
It is advised to look for language clues that help distinguish between high level and detail. The detail clues tend to be more obvious: for example, for instance, one type of something, and so on. On the other hand, you may need to need to train yourself to notice the high level clues. Start with the ones discussed above and keep searching for more when you practice!
Most of the time, inference can be found in one discrete sentence somewhere in the passage (though sometimes we have to combine two sentences to get the complete inference). Most often, The inference can be found in the first few or last few sentences of the entire passage, but it is possible for The inference to show up anywhere.