So much of a weight does RC have on the CAT, so many are the difficulties faced by test-takers and so frequent are the queries that I receive about RC, despite the previous post and the Last Mile To CAT sessions, that I thought that it will be best to devote a series of posts to cracking Reading Comprehension. So before we dive in, I suggest that you read the previous post that outlines how to choose which RCs to solve.
Passage to questions or Questions to Passage or…
Now the big question has always been whether to read the passage first and then go the questions or read the questions first and then go to the passage.
The problem with reading the entire passage first is that it is a great strategy for those who are exceptionally good and comfortable with reading long texts. What does being exceptionally good and comfortable mean?
- The ability to read through the whole passage without losing concentration and the thread of the passage
- The ability to answer the primary purpose, the central idea or other summary questions (questions that test your understanding of the passage as a whole) without going back to the passage
- The ability to remember the exact part of the passage to go back to find the answer to a specific question
With most Indian test-takers the first ability itself is suspect. While they might start with the best of intentions, by the time they reach of the middle of the passage they
- start losing interest
- start sneaking a peek at the questions
- somehow manage to reach the end or
- start going back and forth between the questions and the passage
The problem with looking at the questions first is that we are then not doing RC but Match The Following. So that is something that I would rule out straightaway.
Paragraph to questions approach
What I would recommend to most test-takers is a third way that addresses the problems of the first two.
- Read one paragraph, check if there is any question related to it. If there is then solve it immediately — this will increase your accuracy on specific questions since you will have just read the specific part of the passage.
- If there is no question related to it then go ahead to the next paragraph and repeat the exercise.
- Solve all Summary Questions at the end
- If the paragraphs are short in length, say 4 lines or fewer, you can read two at a time and then go to the questions
While I have been advocating this approach I am still getting queries around both the approach and RC accuracy in general.
The best way to answer this and other queries is by taking the RCs from last year’s CAT and solving them. This one is from the second slot last year.
Creativity is at once our most precious resource and our most inexhaustible one. As anyone who has ever spent any time with children knows, every single human being is born creative; every human being is innately endowed with the ability to combine and recombine data, perceptions, materials and ideas, and devise new ways of thinking and doing. What fosters creativity? More than anything else: the presence of other creative people. The big myth is that creativity is the province of great individual geniuses. In fact creativity is a social process. Our biggest creative breakthroughs come when people learn from, compete with, and collaborate with other people. Cities are the true fonts of creativity. With their diverse populations, dense social networks, and public spaces where people can meet spontaneously and serendipitously, they spark and catalyze new ideas. With their infrastructure for finance, organization and trade, they allow those ideas to be swiftly actualized. As for what staunches creativity, that's easy, if ironic. It's the very institutions that we build to manage, exploit and perpetuate the fruits of creativity — our big bureaucracies, and sad to say, too many of our schools. Creativity is disruptive; schools and organizations are regimented, standardized and stultifying. The education expert Sir Ken Robinson points to a 1968 study reporting on a group of 1,600 children who were tested over time for their ability to think in out-of-the-box ways. When the children were between 3 and 5 years old, 98 percent achieved positive scores. When they were 8 to 10, only 32 percent passed the same test, and only 10 percent at 13 to 15. When 280,000 25-year-olds took the test, just 2 percent passed. By the time we are adults, our creativity has been wrung out of us. I once asked the great urbanist Jane Jacobs what makes some places more creative than others. She said, essentially, that the question was an easy one. All cities, she said, were filled with creative people; that's our default state as people. But some cities had more than their shares of leaders, people and institutions that blocked out that creativity. She called them "squelchers." Creativity (or the lack of it) follows the same general contours of the great socio-economic divide - our rising inequality - that plagues us. According to my own estimates, roughly a third of us across the United States, and perhaps as much as half of us in our most creative cities - are able to do work which engages our creative faculties to some extent, whether as artists, musicians, writers, techies, innovators, entrepreneurs, doctors, lawyers, journalists or educators - those of us who work with our minds. That leaves a group that I term "the other 66 percent," who toil in low-wage rote and rotten jobs — if they have jobs at all — in which their creativity is subjugated, ignored or wasted. Creativity itself is not in danger. It's flourishing is all around us - in science and technology, arts and culture, in our rapidly revitalizing cities. But we still have a long way to go if we want to build a truly creative society that supports and rewards the creativity of each and every one of us.
Question 1 In the author's view, cities promote human creativity for all the following reasons EXCEPT that they contain spaces that A) enable people to meet and share new ideas B) expose people to different and novel ideas, because they are home to varied groups of people. C) provide the financial and institutional networks that enable ideas to become reality. D) provide access to cultural activities that promote new and creative ways of thinking.
Question 2 The author uses 'ironic' in the third paragraph to point out that A) people need social contact rather than isolation to nurture their creativity B) institutions created to promote creativity eventually stifle it C) the larger the creative population in a city, the more likely it is to be stifled D) large bureaucracies and institutions are the inevitable outcome of successful cities
Question 3 The central idea of this passage is that A) social interaction is necessary to nurture creativity B) creativity and ideas are gradually declining in all societies C) the creativity divide is widening in societies in line with socio-economic trends D) more people should work in jobs that engage their creative faculties
Question 4 Jane Jacobs believed that cities that are more creative A) have to struggle to retain their creativity B) have to 'squelch' unproductive people and promote creative ones C) have leaders and institutions that do not block creativity D) typically do not start off as creative hubs
Question 5 The 1968 study is used here to show that A) as they get older, children usually learn to be more creative B) schooling today does not encourage creative thinking in children C) the more children learn, the less creative they become D) technology today prevents children from being creative
Question 6 The author's conclusions about the most 'creative cities' in the US (paragraph 6) are based on his assumption that A) people who work with their hands are not doing creative work B) more than half the population works in non-creative jobs C) only artists, musicians, writers, and so on should be valued in a society D) most cities ignore or waste the creativity of low-wage workers
Paragraph 1
A quick scan through the questions shows that there is no question based on the first paragraph. So you can move to the second one without answering any question.
Do not try to remember questions, if you do so then you will again be doing method 2 — match the following instead of RC.
Paragraph 2
The first question is a specific question based on paragraph 2.
It is an EXCEPT question that is asking you to identify the reason that is NOT stated to make the claim that cities promote creativity.
This has to be the easiest RC question of all time — A, B and C are clearly stated in the passage, D is not mentioned anywhere.
In effect, you have 3 marks in the bag in under 4 minutes.
Paragraph 3
As you start reading the first sentence of the third paragraph itself you should know that there will be a question on this; the first sentence itself says — it’s ironic. It goes without saying that they will test your understanding of what ironic means. The paragraph itself explains it. You go to the questions to find the next question based on it and pocket 3 more marks.
It is again pretty direct and you should have no trouble confirming option B as the right option.
By now you should have 6 marks in 6 minutes.
If you find this question tough then I am afraid there is a fundamental comprehension problem that no amount of strategies or shortcuts can solve. It might sound harsh but you might have to really take another shot at the CAT and spend a lot of time improving your ability in reading and comprehending text written in English.
If you have taken 10 minutes to score these 6 marks from three paragraphs then reading speed is a major issue. The only way out is to practice RCs alone non-stop for a week so that you put so much stress on your reading muscle that it has to grow.
Paragraph 4
After reading this paragraph, you should again scan the questions and you will find that question 5 is related to it.
This is where you will first encounter a mild case of — I am caught between two options.
Options B and C might seem to be vying for your vote.
So how do you break this deadlock?
In the words of my colleague Sujit Sir, who is the author of a famous RC Book, and is the one who makes most of the SimCAT RC questions, the first step is to identify the superficial difference between the options.
When caught between two options,
- Phrase the difference between the two options
- See which one is relevant to the question and eliminate if possible
- If not go the specific part of the passage
- If you are still unable to break the deadlock, go the previous paragraph
Option B — Schooling smothers creativity
Option C — Learning smothers creativity
Even without going back to the paragraph you can see that C has to be wrong! Between learning and schooling, the latter is definitely the culprit.
If you go the paragraph it will be clear the Ken Robinson is an education expert and he is referring to schools.
If it is still not clear then go to the previous paragraph, the last sentence screams the answer out loud.
By the way, I watched the Ken Robinson videos a long time back — this and this are definitely worth a watch.
9 marks in 8 minutes.
Paragraph 5
There is a question on this as well — question 4 — and as mildly indirect as a question can get.
If you are keeping count 12 marks in 10 minutes.
Paragraph 6
The last question is based on this. It is an assumption question that is pretty direct
The author says — in most of our cities 1/3, and in some 1/2, of our people work in creative jobs or jobs of the mind, while the other 2/3 have no jobs or do rotten jobs.
The assumption is captured by only by option A. 15 marks in 13 minutes.
At the end of the exercise, you are left with one unanswered summary question.
This is one of those typical CAT RC questions on which the options frustrate me since I do find any of them to be precisely correct. So the best option on CAT RC questions — reject don’t select. Your heart won’t leap and dance when you see the correct option, you have to reject and be happy with whatever is left.
Question 3 The central idea of this passage is that A) social interaction is necessary to nurture creativity B) creativity and ideas are gradually declining in all societies C) the creativity divide is widening in societies in line with socio-economic trends D) more people should work in jobs that engage their creative faculties
If we go by rejection then
- A can be kept
- B can be rejected since the last paragraph categorically says that creativity is flourishing
- C can be rejected since the passage only says that creative divide follows the socio-economic divide it does not say that the divide has increased
- D can be kept
Now we again boil down to two options and this is a summary question.
You can defend and not score instead of getting out
Should you always mark an answer for every RC question you encounter?
The summary question above is a poorly made one since neither option exactly captures the central idea.
Now if I look at my time spent so far, I have 15 marks in about 16 minutes, which is great from an MPM or Marks Per Minute perspective.
So do I need to break my head and waste my time over this silly question?
Nope, I will be better off moving on without collecting a negative.
Test-takers refuse to consider letting a question go an option. If they have spent so much time reading they think they might as well mark.
The odds of getting it right when stuck between two options are still 50 percent provided you haven’t eliminated the correct option!
So do yourself a favor — defend and not score instead of getting out.
Just to close things on this passage, between A and D I would choose A since it covers a larger portion of the passage and the author is not directly making a claim that more people should be doing creative jobs. The author only says that more people can be in creative jobs.
In the first version of this post, I only wrote this much about the last question of this passage.
But then I started a receiving a few queries that made it clear to me that for many test-takers weak VA scores have a basic problem with a few fundamentals.
They do not clearly look at what the question is asking but only look at the content that question refers to.
What do I mean by this?
The last question is an assumption question.
What is an assumption?
Something which is not stated but is central to drawing a conclusion.
Unlike the real world in which anything that is stated but not proven is not an assumption, on aptitude tests, it is an incorrect premise.
Which is why an assumption is also called the missing premise.
Premise 1 + Missing Premise (Assumption) = Conclusion
The paragraph is asking you to identify the behind the conclusion drawn in paragraph 6.
So before you go to the options go back and paraphrase the conclusion — Creativity divide mirrors the socio-economic divide.
Premises 1 — Cities that are more creative have 1/2 of the population doing work of the mind. Cities that are less creative have 1/3 doing work of the mind.
Premise 2 — The rest of the population is doing rotten jobs or is unemployed.
The conclusion has the term — creativity. The two premises have the terms work of the mind and rotten work.
So the missing premise has to connect creativity and work of the mind or rotten work. Only the first option does that.
So as a process when it comes to assumption questions please follow this process. Otherwise, you will always end up caught between the option that is relevant to the content but is not the answer and the actual assumption.
The reason I favor this approach is that as a question-setter (I have made a few RCs for this year’s SimCATs as well) I know that to make 6 questions I have mine each and every paragraph for questions.
You can maybe have a 3 question passage with no question from a particular passage. But a 6 question passage will have 3 questions from three separate paragraphs.
I know that one passage isn’t enough to prove my point. So I will take up all the passages from last year’s second slot and analyze them through this lens. Hope by the end of this series of posts your RC woes will have reduced considerably.
The CAT Writer 
Thank You, sir, for this much-awaited post!
I have 2 questions if you could please answer them?!
1) Why can’t option 4 be the correct click for question 6? Wherein it is clearly stated in the last line of the 6th paragraph regarding the rote workers’ creativity being undermined.
2) What would be the right option to question 4?
Thank You!
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Hi Rishabh,
1. Thanks for pointing this out, there was a typo, the correct answer is A.
Read the question properly — it is asking you the assumption behind the conclusion. If you know concepts correctly, you will know that an assumption is a missing premise that is used to draw to the conclusion. If it is so clearly stated it be an assumption? An assumption is always unstated but central to drawing the conclusion. The author straight away equates jobs of the mind to jobs that are creative, without any proof and hence assumes that people who work with their hands are doing creative work.
2. You should be confident about this even without knowing the OA, which by the way is C.
All the best!
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Hello sir
Sir should we take summary of each and every paragraph (writing in short points) or not.
Thank you
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It will be useful but time-consuming. If you have a primary purpose question then do it else you can save time by not doing it, unless it is helping your understanding.
One has to ideally follow the thread mentally since writing shows you down. But if you can’t do that, write.
I will show you how to do it in the next post.
All the best!
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thank you so much sir …this approach really worked for me……
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Glad you found it useful. Do go through the two follow up posts so that you can perfect the technique.
All the best!
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Hi Sir,
I applied the above strategy in SIMCAT 13 but it backfired. My score was pathetic and that further dented my overall score as well. Earlier, I used to score on an average 40-48 in VARC section but in SIM 13 I managed only 14. 😦 What could have gone wrong?
Also, I need your guidance for Quants as well. I’m not able to score above 45 in SIMs. The range for Quants score is 20-42. I’ve tried going through Application builders and solved numerous questions but yet I cannot overcome this situation.
In this process, as the exam is approaching my confidence and belief is going downhill and I feel that I cannot even manage 90%ile and that is hampering my preparation as well as my overall confidence.
Could you help/guide me? I already have 3+ years of work exp and if I don’t manage to crack the exam I don’t stand a chance henceforth as the exp will be +1 next year.
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Hi Shashank,
If you are crossing 40 comfortable then there is no point in your trying to change your strategy entirely. All you need to do increase accuracy is to focus on rejection and attempting questions in the right sequence.
If your score is fluctuating so wildly in QA it means that you are yet to master two things — concepts across all areas and the A-B-C approach of choosing and leaving questions. Just blindly practicing will not take you anywhere you need to figure out the exact areas where you are weak or rather the specific concepts you do not know. If you are clear that you know all the concepts and can apply them to the easy and moderate problems then the problem is solely choosing and leaving. Go through my posts on how to improve QA percentile that takes an entire QA section and shows you how to apply the A-B-C approach.
Hope this clarifies,
All the best!
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Hi Sir,
Sure, thanks for the feedback! I’ve gone through all your posts; yet again I’ll go through the Quants section post and try to figure a way out and overcome my weakness!
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Hi Sir,
I have solved many books on critical reasoning (GMAT C.R.) , still my va scores have fluctuated in between as high as 82 to as low as 32 in SIMCATs, this is a serious concern as i don`t exactly know what else i need to do to achieve consistency in va/rc.
Can you recommend me any other book which will enhance my skills at this point of time?
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Hi Saqib,
Huge swings in scores indicate one of two things or both:
1. You are attempting the same number of questions irrespective of the difficulty of the section
2. You are solving questions with intuition or gut-feel rather than a clear process
GMAT CR has nothing to do with CAT VA since neither does CAT test CR directly nor does it mimic the precision with which logical reasoning is tested on the GMAT.
In the last 4 posts, I have outlined what I feel is the best process to follow for an average test-taker as far VA-RC are concerned.
If you have applied these processes diligently and are not finding any improvement then I am afraid I know of no other sources.
Hope this clarifies,
All the best!
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hello sir, how can the answer to question 4 be C? as it is clearly stated that the cities have leaders and institutions that blocked out on creativity!
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Hi Srishti,
The question as I mentioned is mildly indirect. It is asking you what Jane Jacobs believed is the reasons why some cities are more creative.
The paragraph gives you the reason why though all cities have the same potential some are more and some are less creative — it boils down to leaders to block creativity. Obviously, leaders who block creativity are not going to make cities more creative they are going to make them less creative, so cities that are more creative do not have such leaders, which is what option C says.
Hope this clarifies.
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Hi Sir, sir my highest VA score in simcat is 18.please tell me the guidance how my RC Ican practising in daily basis…so I will crack the cutoff of VA section ..
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Hi Ratnesh,
You have to practice section tests or questions in the application builder by executing the strategies outlined for RC and VA in the last four posts. If you are able to execute the strategies in the posts you should be able to clear the cut-offs.
All the best.
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Sir, In question 6 both options A & B are the ones that remain after elimination. But between these two, B is almost directly mentioned in the passage (as the other 66%) while A is implied. Which should I go for? Or leave the question when in this dilemma? Seems very subjective.
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The question is asking you for the assumption behind the author’s conclusion in paragraph 6. What conclusion? That creativity divide mirrors the employment divide.
Option B is already stated – either half or 2/3 are doing rotten jobs or do not have jobs. So this cannot be the assumption since it’s already stated. So it can never be part of the consideration set.
So if you fundamentals about what is an assumption correct then you will be left with A. There is nothing subjective about this since it’s not a question of degree but of kind.
Hope this clarifies.
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Hi Sir,
Whenever I give Mock test. I barely manage to score around 60(Total). But after the test, when I try to solve those questions, I manage to solve all of them correctly. I dont know, what happens to me while giving mocks.Please guide me.
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Hi Akanksha,
The big issue if what you say true might be the selection of a question/set/passage. Order of attempts is everything as far test-taking is concerned. In QA for example, I might be able to solve 25 questions but my order might be a set of 10 questions in the first round, 10 in the second and 5 in the increasing order of my estimation of the time taken to solve the question. The same thing applies to RCs and DI-LR sets.
I suggest you go through the posts on how to increase DI-LR percentiles and QA as well in which I have taken entire sections and analyzed and solved the questions as well.
The only other reason why this might be happening is that during a test you tend to be a hurry and rush and in the process don’t really understand the question hence get stuck or move on and then the pressure builds up.
When you later do it at home, you read it properly and understand the question and hence are able to solve.
So I suggest the following as a plan of action.
1. Set your first goal as a score of 100, which means around 30 questions correct, or 10 across each section. This will translate into 15 attempts with an accuracy of 80%, 12 right.
2. Decide that you are going to choose the 15 easiest questions or sets and go through the posts to learn how to do that. You have 3 minutes to solve each of these 15 questions and 14 minutes to read and leave the remaining questions.
3. In the next test, raise the bar to 120 and raise the attempts accordingly.
There is no way in life that you can not know what’s happening to you. All you need to do is step back, and look at your current process objectively and chart out the process suggested. The key words are process and selection that have nothing to do with knowing concepts.
Hope this helps,
All the best!
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Sir, what is the A-B-C approach ( English section and LR DI ) ? I came across this while seeing the solution but was not able to find it.
Plz share the link or plz explain.
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sir ,
i have a doubt. in question 6, why are assuming that artists do not work with their hands and selecting option A as our answer (be it creative or not everybody works with their hands 😦 )
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The passage clearly mentions that artists, musicians, writers as those who work with their minds, once this is stated it cannot be an assumption but a premise. The passage defines manual labour as work of the hands.
The passage is calls its work of the mind since while artists might use their hands they still do a lot of mind work to create whereas labour involves physical execution but no creation using the mind.
Hope this clarifies.
Also always eliminate, do not select 🙂
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sir
I have a doubt, why is answer to question 6 option A .
everybody work with their hands. be it creative or not.
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Hi sir,
You have very skillfully reinforced an idea which i already knew…”You have to change your approach to get different results”…But quite honestly I’m not following your ideas fully…Iv just subconsiously ingrained the idea of the ‘need for a change’…Now my brain looks out for new patterns, examines and compares them, and gives me feedbacks on improvement..Amazing what our brains can do…
And, this is on the lighter side, to be taken in good humour only…
For the fellas who are like “sirjee I read your post but very good i top in RC pleez i am improve marks tell me some badass trick bla bla’
English can only be caught
It can never be taught !!
Kudos…
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Glad you liked the post and appreciate your wise-cracks 🙂 Hope you do well come 25-November!
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HI Sir,
I often use an approach of “reading half the passage, solving the relevant questions, then reading the other half of the passage and solving the rest of the questions”. This approach has mostly helped me in getting good marks in RC, but sometimes it does backfire (especially when the RC is of difficult nature).
What changes should I bring in my approach to overcome such a scenario?
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Hi Shubham,
It will be tough for me to tell you to how to tweak your approach on a tough passage.
It will be like trying to answer how to not to get out on a good ball.
After a point, tough passages are purely about your English comprehension ability.
So there is nothing much I can do on that front.
So stick to your approach. The only thing you can use is may be the method of elimination instead of selection.
Hope this clarifies,
All the best!
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Hello sir, I have just started preparing for CAT’19 VARC part and need your guidance.
->What should be my approach in the beginning and how many RC’s I should solve on a daily basis to get good hands-on before CAT’19.
I’m asking this so that I can remain on track from the beginning only.
Apart from solving previous years RC’s should I go for something else as well?
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Hi Shravan,
The only way to crack RCs is to solve 3 RCs a day till your pace of reading with comprehension is good enough to manage the time limit of the VA-RC section. Reading editorials and stuff over and above this will be a bonus.
Hope this clarifies,
All the best!
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Sir,
Will apply this in my routine and will get back to you.
Thank you.
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Hi Sir,
I am re-taker and my score in VARC section of CAT was around 35 gives 80-85 percentile.
Now I am scoring just 1 & 8 in first two SIMCATs where as in sectional test I am scoring 24.
I am able to clear cut off in other section but not able to get competitive score in VARC section.
Could you please suggest prep strategy and test strategy according to my current level in VARC section?
My target is 60+ in VARC section in CAT19 – I will achieve it but need to back on track quickly with the help of your guidance 🙂
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HI Rushabh,
SimCATs are always a bit tougher than the CAT and hence the below par score.
I have covered most of the strategies in the post on this page — https://thecatwriter.com/category/verbal-strat/
What’s important is whether you follow the processes outlined for VA or read them but go back to solving through gut-feel.
Practice with a view to executing these strategies to a T and you will see a spike in scores.
All the best!
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Thanks sir 🙂 I will learn those strategies and apply to a T.
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Hi Sir,
You asked to go through the previous article – on how to select RC’s to solve . I am unable to find this article in the blog. Can you please help?
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Hi Varun,
This post — https://thecatwriter.com/2018/08/27/cat-2018-how-to-increase-your-accuracy-on-the-verbal-ability-section/
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Sir! I took 11 minutes to solve RC. Got 4 correct.
So sir which strategy should i adopt as per your view? Reading questions 1st or passage?
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