Reading Comprehension Techniques

There are many Coaching Institutes which will teach you speed reading, skimming, scanning etc… etc… but in the exam situation it is most probable that all these techniques will not even strike our mind. Therefore, it is important that we start to regularly read - books, blogs :) , passages, newspapers,magazines and anything which makes even an ounce of sense.

Here, We will start solving the previous years RC passages one by one. So that we can understand the way the IIMs/CAT think(s). Usually, coaching Institutes never are able to answer questions from verbal correctly. So, our best bet to start thinking in lines of CAT would be old CAT question papers only.

There are many methods suggested for going about the CAT RCs.

Method 1:

1. Go through questions

2. Read passage

3. Answer questions

Adv : You know what you need to look for in the passage

Disadv :

1. It is possible that you will have concentrated so much on remembering the questions that you cannot give the passage the same attention and at the end, you might not have read between the lines. Mostly, CAT passages aren’t direct, so it is important to keep the whole topic in mind while answering questions.

Method 2:

1. Read Passage

2. Read Questions and Answer Questions

Adv : You get the essence of the passage because you aren’t reading the questions

Disadv : You might need to go through the whole passage again, several times while answering the questions as you sometimes need to locate authors/people/dates/phrases etc…

Method 3 : (This is the method I use)

1. Skim through questions for important/striking words.

Here, you shouldn’t read the whole question or even try to make sense of anything in it. Just look for the following in the questions

- Names

- Places

- Weird/Difficult/Striking words

- Phrases ie., you look for quotes “– ” or ‘–’

2. Go through passage and underline all the words that seem to match what you have just read and any other words you find difficult to comprehend or which you feel might be necessary.

3. Write down the exact topic which each paragraph is talking about.

4. Write in big letters the main objective of the whole paragraph.

4. Go through the questions and answer the questions.

We will see how this method can be put to use for various RC passages in the forthcoming posts.

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