CAT verbals: Top strategies

By now I hope your build up of stock of words is complete. You have gone through the grammar portions provided by the coachings – thoroughly I hope. But some of you may be still facing difficulties. What’s the way out of it?

In every CAT, some 25-30 marks questions are there in the verbal section. In CAT 2005, they were mostly 1 or 2 marks questions. Getting a decent score there is utmost important to crack CAT, everyone reading this blog knows it.

I’ll suggest you some strategies that helped me a lot! If they help you too, nothing like it. Below are the variations that come in CAT vocabs:

1. Vocabulary based: Since CAT 02, no such questions came in CAT main paper. Again even if it comes it will come with four alternatives. If you don’t know the meaning, try to make a sentence with the word. See if any of the alternatives fits there. Probably two alternatives will be a bit close, chance your luck if you can’t guess correctly. Anyway, this vocab based questions are antiquated now and hardly any chance of them coming in CAT 06.
2. Sentence correction: This section is currently the favourite in CAT. Sometimes, it may be misleading and confusing. I found the IMS guideline a great help to identify the correct ones. If you are not able to grasp as yet, follow the steps:
1. Read the basics again from your coaching material.
2. Look at the sentence construction. Try to analyze grammatically and try to recollect if you have read it somewhere. If you have had a good reading habit, you can link it up with some sentence that you read before.
3. Otherwise, try to understand the meaning it conveys and construct the sentence in your own words. Have faith in yourself, and check the sentence with similar construction – if you find it mark it as correct.
3. Paraphrasing: One easy way I found was, instead of carefully reading each line and then trying to make a coherent paragraph, I first would read the para’s very quick, almost within 20 seconds and then look at the alternatives. By then, I have the total text in mind. Now looking at the alternatives say BACD, ADBC, ACDB and CDBA. Reading the first sentence of each alternative, I could easily eliminate two. Then read the paragraphs as arranged in 3^rd and 4^th alternatives and see which one makes better sense and is more coherent. That worked wonderfully well for me and that too took nearly 40-45 seconds!

Let me know if the strategies work.

Keep mailing with your suggestions and queries. Tomorrow I’ll present before you:

“How an average merit guy cracked IIMA?”

This guy is of average merit, and even his performance here is not so cool. But, the truth is even with average merit he cracked IIMA. Even I want to know how he did it!

Keep tuned in!

Cheers

Boss@IIMA