This is the second article in the series of posts that we are doing on ‘Reading for CAT’. The other ones can be read at the links given below: Why Building a Reading Habit is an important part of CAT 2021 Preparation?  How to develop a Reading Habit to help you with CAT 2021?  What should you read to help with CAT 2021 Preparation? (Will be published soon) Which novels / books should a CAT aspirant read in 2021? (Will be published soon) There are plenty of things that CAT aspirants differ about. For example, what is the right number of mocks to attempt or which coach

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I hope that anyone reading this article would know that the CAT exam is broadly divided into 3 areas: Reading Comprehension and Verbal Ability Logical Reasoning and Data Interpretation Quantitative Aptitude I guess that some of you would not know how important Reading Comprehension is in the entire scheme of things. What I know for a fact, is that a large number of CAT aspirants neglect ‘Reading Comprehension’ in the early stages of their preparation and more often than not – never actually end up performing up to their peak potential. It is a problem that is quite co

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This must be a nervous time for you. It is completely natural. But if you are panicking, you are probably taking it a bit too far. Rest assured, the efforts that you have put in over the last few months would not go to waste. I can only wish that all readers of this post ended up with the colleges they deserve and hope that they actually get something even better. But we all know that is statically impossible.  Here are a few things that I suggest that you do in the last week to calm your nerves and hopefully ace the CAT 2020 exam. 1. Revise important formulas While I understand that yo

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Let’s start with the basic question - what exactly is the difference between an idiom and proverb? Are they the same? If you say, “at loggerheads” instead of “strong disagreement among people,” you're using an idiom. The meaning of an idiom is different from the actual meaning of the words used. “Make hay while the sun shines” is a proverb. Proverbs are old but familiar sayings that usually give advice. A phrase is just a group of words. If you know the meaning of the individual words in a phrase, you know the meaning it conveys. But in an idiom, the meaning is not c

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Most of us are lured to attempt Para jumble/sentence completion questions in CAT/Mock CAT. In these type of questions, we eventually, come to down to 2 confusing choices. And the sad story is, most of the time we select the wrong option.But, the irony is it’s hard to leave these type of questions as with added logic these questions can be very scoring and consume less time as compared to an RC. So let me try to spread some gyaan that might be able to help you out in these situations. First ,try to find the purpose behind the para: When the purpose is to explain something – the

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Relationships are an integral part of our life whether between or among living ones. Relationships provide definiteness between two objects or persons. Relationships among people are complicated and confusing especially when you are living in a big joint family with innumerable relatives! Blood Relations is a very important part of reasoning section in competitive exam. Every year questions are asked based on them in aptitude tests and entrance exams such as CAT, XAT, SNAP and Bank exams. One other topic of reasoning section is Coding-Decoding. And in this blog, we will understand and develo

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In the post on learning strategies, I had mentioned Root words which helps to improve your vocabulary by memorising newly learnt words for CAT preparation. Throughout this series on words, we had focused on learning new words by grouping them - confusing words, similar words, idioms etc. Root words are just another way you can group words. A lot words in the English language have originated from Latin (others have their roots in Greek, Sanskrit, German etc.). But why bother learning root words? Will it be of any help in CAT or any other exam (XAT, IIFT, SNAP etc.) The answer is: Yes, it

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let me first list down the topics that I am going to cover in this particular blogpost: Number of factors of a given number Number of even factors or odd factors of a given number Sum of all factors of a given number Sum of all even factors or odd factors of a given number   We know that a number N can be written as a product of its factors as given below   N = ap x bq x cr … Here a,b,c… are prime factors of N & p,q,r … are the powers of the prime factors of N.   In such a case the number of factors of N are given by the formula &

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The concept of ‘divide and conquer’, derived from the Latin phrase ‘Divide et impera’, was put into use effectively by everyone from Caesar to Napoleon to The British in India. Even Gaddafi tried using the same but as current events show us – he wasn’t very effective. Dividing rather divisibility rules to be specific can come in really handy at times in solving problems based on Number Systems. The standard rules which nearly all of us are very comfortable with are the ones for 2n and 5n. For these all that one needs to do is look at the last ‘n’ digits of the number. If

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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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