Reading Comprehension is an extremely important and an ample scoring section in the CAT paper. Some people consider this as their favorite area while others fear it considerably. Mainly this difference happens because of the difference in reading habits. If you have little reading habits, that might cause some problems for you in managing this section. Most people are hardly voracious readers especially CAT going online, very few of us read over the computer. Nevertheless, the following few steps if practiced can be a world of help.

Strategy for tackling the RC area

Selecting the passage should be the very first step. Selection of a set you are not comfortable with and late discovery of this fact would be disastrous. Selection of passage should be done on the basis comfort level according to the subject matter of the passage. You might not like economics, you may be scared of technology and you might find philosophy very boring. However you must prepare yourself with these subjects. Reading articles on such subjects won’t serve the entire purpose. You must prepare yourself by practicing yourself to read such articles on your computer as CAT is going Computer Based.

A number of sites are available to download such articles and be read as electronic documents. In earlier cat papers, the passages happened to be considerably lengthy. Though in recent times the length has gone down along with the number of passages but they have become more complex. The computer based CAT from this year might be a surprise element in the RC section. However according to experts chances of going back to the traditional pattern is less likely to happen. This implies that the questions would be more inference oriented. This feature hardly helps anyone in building a comfort level in this section. Evaluating the comfort level would be a little easy if you actually read a few questions related to the passage before selecting it.

Three methods for attempting RC passage

The first type may be the traditional approach of reading the passage before going to the questions. Doing so, sticking to the basics that is you would be able to identify with the theme of the passage. Reading at a decent pace is extremely important to comprehend the important ideas. It is impossible to remember everything you read in the passage so trying that would wastage of time and deviation of focus. Comprehension and retention skills being considerably good a person can answer some questions without actually going back to the passage. However if there is need one should come back o the passage.

This method should be best if you are reading an abstract passage abstract or a philosophical passage that does not contain much data .Answering certain questions asking about the title of the passage or may be the best conclusion that can be drawn from the passage can be a lot easier through this method.
The second process involves reading the questions before reading the passage. This is a better option for passages with factual questions and data or information filled questions. This saves a lot of time. This method is not that effective with style tone dependent passages.

The third type involves the combination of reading the questions and the passages. Reading the passages part by part and trying to answer questions after completing a part is the key .This ensures that you are reading the entire passage to get the idea along with breaking it into parts and answering questions that reduces the time taken otherwise and makes it a lot simpler.