The most important part of CAT Verbal reasoning are questions based on assumptions and inferences. If you think you would rather skip this tricky topic- Well, you shouldn’t. Why? Because once you learn to tackle these well, they can prove to be the most scoring and time-saving questions of CAT. The purpose of such questions is to evaluate your reasoning skills. And you can definitely develop these. How? Just concept clarity and lots of practice! Students are often confused between assumptions and inferences. While it may not matter in case of easy questions but you need to know the differ

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Quantitative Aptitude is an important part of the CAT Exam. As a matter of fact, it will not be wrong to say that it is the most important part of the CAT exam because the most amount of time is spent on preparation of the Quantitative section. Should it be that way? – Perhaps the answer is yes for a few students but the actual number of CAT aspirants who make Quant their top priority is much larger than it needs to be a reason. And do you know the reasons behind that? First and foremost, it is the inherent fear of Math. We are often afraid of what we do not understand fully and Quant

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While most students are comfortable with the concept of HCF (Highest Common Factor) and LCM (Lowest Common Multiple), they somehow fail to apply it when required. Sometimes, they do not even realise that it needs to be applied. I sometimes feel sad when students ask me, “Sir, when to apply HCF and when to apply LCM?”. This question is a symbol of everything that is wrong with rote learning. HCF and LCM are concepts that students start learning as early as the 5th class in school (may be even earlier in some cases). The problem occurs because a few of them forget how the concepts need t

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In one of the earlier posts on this blog, we had discussed the important books for CAT preparation and how reading helps with tackling the verbal ability section. If you go through a lot of the reading comprehension passages asked in exams you will realize they are similar in tone to these books or newspaper articles and that is why reading helps. But just reading will not help. To really shave off time required in answering a question (especially in RCs) it is best if you know what the words mean eliminating the need to guess or take time to understand what the passage is talking about

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Reading Comprehension (RC) has now become indispensable to the CAT exam. Each year one gets multiple passages for testing. Further, RC is also an important component in the other exams such as XAT, SNAP or NMAT. So, this section is one where students devote countless hours to prepare. A complication that has now arisen is due to the online nature of the CAT exam. There are many students who are genuinely active readers in their own lives, but cannot ace the RC section. It may have psychological reasons, but one factor is definitely the online nature. Research has proven that a human’s av

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Quantitative Aptitude is an important part of the CAT exam. If you look at the pattern of the paper for the last few years, it has had a weightage of roughly 1/3rd since CAT went online in 2008. From 2015, Quant has had 34 questions out of 100. The same pattern is expected to continue in 2020 as well. Broadly speaking, Quantitative Aptitude can be further divided into 5 sub sections: Arithmetic Algebra Geometry Number System Modern Maths While the exact number of questions in these topics changes every year there are some broad patterns that can be noticed. We lo

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Paradox is a seemingly absurd or contradictory statement or proposition which when investigated may prove to be well-founded or true. A flaw is an error. You are using elements that just cannot work together or you are distorting the line of thinking. They render an argument worthless or useless. How to approach questions on paradoxes? Consider the line of reasoning Assess the possible contradictions in the argument Assess what assumption might reconcile and reconnect the contradictions The different forms in which these questions may be asked: Which of the following,

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Quadratic Equations based on x + 1/x: x + 1/x is itself a category of questions. There are many variants of this in which either you were given a value of this equation or you have to find the higher degree value which would be similar to this equation. For a clear understanding let’s do some examples: Example 1: If 6(x2 + 1/x2) - 5(x + 1/x) = 38 and x is positive and rational then find the value of x. Sol: In this question, firstly we have to make the first bracket as a complete square of the second bracket. This we can by adding 2.x.1/x which is equivalent to 2. Then the equat

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We have learned about simultaneous equations in two and three unknowns. When we have two independent equation in two unknowns or three independent equations in 3 unknowns, we can solve for the variables. These type of equations are called “deterministic equations”. The variables have a unique value in these equations. However, if we have only one equation in three unknowns, such equations are called “Indeterminate equations”. The variables here do not have unique values but take more than one value – in general, an infinite number of values. If we impose certain other conditio

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Quadratic Equations: As we all know a quadratic equation is a second-degree polynomial in x equated to zero and also if the co-efficient of x2 is zero, it becomes a linear equation. It would be a waste of time to explain how to find roots to a CAT aspirant so skipping the very normal basics let’s understand the various types of question on quadratic that appears in CAT exam. Constructing A Quadratic Equation Very often we are required to obtain a quadratic equation when some conditions are given. The following conditions occur frequently. The roots of the quadratic equation a

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