Reading Comprehension Sources for CAT Exam and Resources to Prepare
Tuesday, July 16th, 2019
Reading Comprehensions constitute about 70% of the CAT Verbal Ability section. This makes it very important as well as the scoring section. CAT and other management exams use passages from multiple sources for the exam. The passages range from topics like philosophy, history, art, technology, business, sociology, economics, etc. To be able to ace this section, you need to build a reading habit. In this article, we will be sharing multiple online resources which can help you to get familiar with passages on a variety of topics.
The scoring in the Reading Comprehension section depends on:
- Good reading speed
- Ability to understand and retain the content
- Analyse the details and understand the tone of the writer
For any article that you read, do the following things:
- Write an overall summary of the passage after you are done
- Write key points from each passage as you go
- Try to form opinions and arguments about what you have read
The reason that we are asking for this is, reading a lot of articles will not prove to be useful until you are sure that you are able to comprehend it properly. Doing this regularly will also wire your brain in a manner that it will start looking out for important details automatically which will be very useful while answering questions.
Now, we will share some useful online resources for your reading and improvement.
Reading Comprehension Resources to Improve Yourself
1. AlDaily.com
The opinion pieces are usually better reads than the others. AlDaily gives you a small description of the piece to read anything you think you might be interested in. You should list down the categories of articles like philosophy, art, etc and then search these on this website. Make sure that you do not keep on reading only 1 kind of article. You need to prepare yourself and be comfortable with all genres.
2. NYTimes.com
The New York Times is an American newspaper based in New York City with worldwide influence and readership. You can start by reading Indian newspapers, then move on to international ones like these. Every year 1-2 articles in CAT paper can be expected from here. In CAT 2017, morning slot, there were 2 articles from NYTimes. But it is a paid subscription-based newspaper. So, if you don’t want to spend on a subscription, you have other alternatives also.
3. The Guardian
The Guardian blogs are free for anybody to read. They also filter the article’s subject-wise. Also, use its subject wise filtering of the article. This is amazingly useful as you can read articles from specific areas for your CAT prep. Make sure you read articles topic-wise. Here is the link for the same.
4. Books
You can also read the following to build up an interest in reading and score better in RC
- of Speculation by Jenny Offill
- Animal Farm by George Orwell
- Tuesdays with Morrie by Mitch Albom
- The Reluctant Fundamentalist by Mohsin Hamid
- Heartburn by Nora Ephron
5. RC Books
Those who are doing self-preparation for CAT can also use these books for practicing questions.
- How to Prepare for Verbal Ability and Reading Comprehension for CAT’- by Arun Sharma & Meenakshi Upadhyay
- ‘Verbal Ability and Reading Comprehension for the CAT’ – by Nishit K Sinha
6. Improve reading speed
- Spritz: Boost your reading speed. Spritz is one of the rare speed-reading websites/app that actually helps.
7. Improve hold on the English language
- BBC – Learning English: A great resource to know and understand the various nuances of the English language.
- /r/WritingPrompts: Strangers give you a random (and mostly weird) topic, and you need to write an engaging story around it. Helps build your vocab, grammar and comprehension skills.
8. Blogs
Blogs can prove to be very useful for CAT preparation because not only to they offer great content, they also have detailed analysis and opinions and arguments on a lot of topics. Here is a list of some blogs you can refer:
- Gurcharan Das: He was the former head of Proctor and Gamble India. Read his blogs to know more about the Indian political and business scene. Here is the link- Gurcharan Das
- Swamithan Aiyar: For rigorous economic and political analysis, dig into this guy. Your general knowledge about law and economics is bound to increase. Here is the link- Swaminomics.
Reading Comprehension Sources for CAT Exam Questions
Other than these resources, we are also sharing with you a detailed list of each passage covered in CAT 2018, 2017, morning and afternoon slots along with the sources they have been taken from. You can simply click the links given here, read these articles and many more from the same websites.
CAT Exam 2017 – Morning Slot – Reading Comprehension Sources
| Passage | Source |
| Understanding where you are in the world is a basic survival skill, which is why we, like most species come hard-wired with | Click Here… |
| I used a smartphone GPS to find my way through the cobblestoned maze of Geneva’s Old Town, | Click Here… |
| Local jobs are a major casualty of what analysts are calling, with only a hint of hyperbole, the retail apocalypse | Click Here… |
| Scientists have long recognized the incredible diversity within a species. | Click Here… |
| Do sports mega events like the summer Olympic Games benefit the host city economically? It depends, but the prospects are less than rosy. | Click Here… |
CAT Exam 2017 – Afternoon Slot – Reading Comprehension Sources
| Passage | Source |
| Creativity is at once our most precious resource and our most inexhaustible one. | Click Here… |
| During the frigid season…it’s often necessary to nestle under a blanket to try to stay warm. | Click Here… |
| The end of the age of the internal combustion engine is in sight. | Click Here… |
| Typewriters are the epitome of a technology that has been comprehensively rendered obsolete by the digital age. | Click Here… |
| Despite their fierce reputation. Vikings may not have always been the plunderers and pillagers popular culture imagines them to be. | Click Here… |
CAT Exam 2018 – Morning Slot – Reading Comprehension Sources
| Passage | Source |
| Typically, elephant researchers have cited, as a cause of aggression, the high levels of testosterone in newly matured male elephants or the competition for land and resources between elephants and humans. | Click Here… |
| The only thing worse than being lied to is not knowing you’re being lied to. It’s true that plastic pollution is a huge problem, of planetary proportions. | Click Here… |
| Indian government [has] announced an international competition to design a National War Memorial in New Delhi, to honour all of the Indian soldiers who served in the various wars and counter-insurgency campaigns from 1947 onwards. | – |
| When researchers at Emory University in Atlanta trained mice to fear the smell of almonds (by pairing it with electric shocks),. | Click Here… |
| Economists have spent most of the 20th century ignoring psychology, positive or otherwise. But today there is a great deal of emphasis on how happiness can shape global economies, or — on a smaller scale — successful business practice. | Click Here… |
CAT Exam 2018 – Afternoon Slot – Reading Comprehension Sources
| Passage | Source |
| NOT everything looks lovelier the longer and closer its inspection. But Saturn does. It is gorgeous through Earthly telescopes. | Click Here… |
| More and more companies, government agencies, educational institutions and philanthropic organisations are today in the grip of a new phenomenon: ‘metric fixation’. | Click Here… |
| The complexity of modern problems often precludes any one person from fully
understanding them. |
Click Here… |
| Grove snails as a whole are distributed all over Europe, but a specific variety of the snail, with a distinctive white-lipped shell, | Click Here… |
| Will a day come when India’s poor can access government services as easily as drawing cash from an ATM? | Click Here… |
For more articles on Verbal ability, you can click on the following links:
How to use tech for RC preparation
A Wine-lover’s Guide to CAT Reading Comprehension Strategies
Good luck!
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please sir if possible then please add the sources of cat 2019 passages it would be very helpful then .