Verbal ability@ 'Read more to hone verbal ability in CAT'

Sept. 12, 2012 - PRLog -- There are exactly 30 days left for CAT 2012. Now that you have reached the last lap, you must be extra cautious about your weak areas. Verbal ability often troubles aspirants. Sandeep Das, an author and IIM Bangalore alumnus, shares the study plan for the verbal ability section with 30 days remaining for the D-day.

The English section (verbal ability and reading comprehension) is one of the trickiest ones to score of. If you are a voracious reader and have incredibly strong vocabulary, the section can be a cakewalk and you can save precious time here to devote to other sections during the examination. However, if you are not too comfortable in this section and are facing consistent difficulty, it raises serious concerns over your eventual ability to do well in the examination. Given that it is impossible to master the language in a short span, the following steps, if practised well, can be of immense benefit.

Read, read and read:
Read more and more to sharpen your verbal ability. There is no other shortcut method. However, as most online tutorials prescribe, you don’t need to read books of psychology, social science and genetics to improve your ability in this section. Reading any newspaper regularly for an hour can improve your proficiency significantly (newspapers need not be politically refined ones such as The Economist or The Hindu). An additional advantage of reading newspapers is that it will augur well during the group discussion stage, as candidates need to have sound understanding of current affairs over a period of time.

Pick up right books to improve vocabulary:
Your friends who are preparing for GMAT/GRE will be learning an inordinate number of words. I saw CAT aspirants who tried to learn more than 3,000 words as part of their preparation. However, it is important to be able to understand the context in which words have been used rather committing them to memory. I have personally found Word Power Made Easy by Norman Lewis to be extremely helpful in developing vocabulary and cultivating the ability to understand the proper context.

Past is a good indicator of future
Although clichéd as a suggestion, it is an extremely helpful exercise to go through the previous years’ CAT papers and take mock tests hosted by various coaching centers. Diligently practising these papers can give a good idea of the types, patterns and quality of the questions. Similarly, the candidate can also develop an innate ability to guess the right answer by looking at the sort of questions that are typically asked over the last few years.

In conclusion, if an hour is devoted daily to practise this section, it can do wonders within a few months. Given what is at stake (a seat at the hallowed IIMs), every minute of this hour will be worth at the end of it.

About the author:
Sandeep Das, an MBA from IIM Bangalore, is an author, anchor, freelance journalist, and management consultant. His first book, Yours Sarcastically, is a ‘not-so-diplomatic’ take on the life of a 20-something person in contemporary India.