When it comes to aptitude tests, there has always been one tricky question — can some things truly be taught?

This was the basis of an iconic lawsuit in the test prep industry between the College Board, which owns the SAT and Stanley Kaplan. The founder of one of the first test prep companies in the world, who first taught a student in the year 1946!

“To say you can’t improve scores is to say you can’t improve students, and I disagree with that,” said Kaplan in an interview with The New York Times

DI-LR is one section where this question becomes moot all over again. Isn’t it pure logic? How can that be taught?

This much is true — it is the most representative aptitude test question type — pure skill — where knowledge is important but takes a back seat to logic.

I always feel the perfect analogy is with sports. Can you play without any sporting talent? No. Can you get better without a coach? No.

What the coach will teach you after a particular game is not the actual playing of the game, but the micro-things that you need to execute technically to excel.

Carlos Alacaraz just emphatically won the U.S. Open after converting his weakest shot — the serve — into his strongest shot. How did he do it? By making a specific tweak in the way his right hand needed to move. Please note: he had already reached #1 with his old serve!

Similarly, for DI-LR, you cannot actually learn or mug up sets, but do ten things correctly in the way you go about solving, while reading, before solving and during solving.

I have distilled these ten things into X Commandments and demonstrated them using three actual CAT sets.