Reading Comprehension in Verbal Ability section is a common testing area in most of the competitive exams held for entry into government jobs or admission to business schools. It requires you to read a passage, analyse it and answer questions quickly and accurately.
Reading Comprehension is a scoring area since analysing one passage helps in answering multiple questions in one go. But for a lot of people who find it uninteresting to read English content of any type, this could create a mental block. If this is not one of your stronger areas, you better start building on it immediately. But how? The answer isn’t an easy one.
Read varied content
Start reading anything and everything because the passages that you get to read in any of these exams like CAT, GMAT or other competitive exams are varied in nature. You have to develop a love for reading, this will keep you in good stead not just for the exams but in the long run too. The most successful people in any field are most often, voracious readers. Practise reading from various sources like books, newspapers, magazines, blogs, extracts, novels, etc. All the content from these is available online these days. Ensure that you cover various areas such as:
- Business and economics
- Science, environment, and technology
- Art and literary criticism
- Philosophy, Spirituality and sociology
- Sports, Politics, World History
This will help you in building a broad base of knowledge areas and when you see a passage from one of these areas in the exam, you will be able to relate to it.
Reading comprehension strategies
- Time yourself while reading a passage. Once done, write down a short summary of the main theme (not in the exam but during the course of your preparation) and verify. This will help you check how accurately you processed the information in a short period of time.
- Cover various areas and ensure that you are comfortable with any kind of content.
- Don’t read individual words. Practise reading chunks of words in one go. This will help in covering the passage in a shorter time.
- Internalise what you are reading in the first pass itself to the extent possible so that you do not need to re-read the passage for every question.
- Highlight or underline important words or phrases. This will help in answering fact based questions faster without having to spend time in searching.
- Every passage is not of the same difficulty level. Learn to identify the difficulty level of the passage in the first glance. This will give you an estimate of the time you would probably spend in reading and analysing it. For example, a fact based passage can be read faster as compared to an extract from Sigmund Freud book.
- If you don’t understand the meaning of a specific word / phrase, don’t get stuck on it. Most often, the context of the sentence will help in understanding the word / phrase.
- Don’t think that you have to answer all the questions given for a specific passage just because you spent time reading the passage. If you are in serious doubt about the answer choice, skip the question. Most of the exams penalise a wrong answer.
There is no shortcut to answering questions on RC passages. Practise and practise well. If you want to get more insights, you can reach out to our experts at RankerEdge, just by writing a note to info@rankeredge.com.