Systematic Material For Reading Comprehension

[Subodh Kant]

Ever since you learned to read, you've been tested on your comprehension of written material, so it's no surprise that Reading Comprehension is the most familiar section in all of standardized testing. Medicine, law, archaeology, psychology, dentistry, teaching, business—the exams that stand at the entrance to study in these and other fields have one thing in common: Reading Comprehension passages. No matter what academic area you pursue, you have to make sense of dense, even unfamiliar prose, and business school is no exception.

If you're looking to score a 100 percentile on the CAT or XAT, then you shouldn't expect to see too many easy Reading Comp passages. For the purposes of this thread, I have compiled for your test-taking pleasure a group of the densest, nastiest passages we could find. If you can ace these in a reasonable amount of time, it's safe to say that you have absolutely nothing to fear from Reading Comp questions come test day.

My Planning for articles in this thread

1. Some basic techniques
2. Practice for every techniques discussed
3. Toughest Practice material in question format
4. Some dense reading material (for this I am dependent on you people. Search the editorial and other articles page of international newspaper like NYT, The Guardian (IIMs favourite) Wall Street Journal etc.
5. Analysis and explanation.

5.

[Subodh Kant]

Reading comprehension tests critical reading skills. Among other things, it tests whether you can:
§ Summarize the main idea of a passage
§ Differentiate between ideas explicitly stated in a text and those implied by the author
§ Make inferences based on information in a text
§ Analyze the logical structure of a passage
§ Deduce the author's tone and attitude about a topic from the text

In reading comp, you are presented with a reading passage (in an area of business, social science, biological science, or physical science), and then asked 3 - 6 questions about that text. You are not expected to be familiar with any topic beforehand—all the information is contained in the text in front of you. In fact, if you happen to have some previous knowledge about a given topic, it is important that you not let that knowledge affect your answers.

Naturally, some passages will be easier than others, though all will present a challenge. The passages will have a tone and content that one might expect from a scholarly journal. Expect to see 3 or 4 Reading Comp passages—in areas of business, social science, and natural science—and a total of about 15 - 25 questions.

[Subodh Kant]

__________________________________________________ _____________________

Don't feel that you have to memorize or understand every little thing as you read. You can always refer to the passage to clarify the meaning of a specific detail.
__________________________________________________ _____________________

[Subodh Kant]

THE 4 BASIC PRINCIPLES OF READING COMPREHENSION

Here are the basic things that you need to succeed on Reading Comprehension:

1. Look for the topic and scope of a passage; the author's purpose and structure; and the author's voice.

Usually we read to learn something or to pass the time pleasantly. Neither of these goals has anything to do with the CAT. Nor does reading for content. On the CAT, we don't want to read for overall content—we want to read strategically. There's just no time under strict test conditions to understand everything that's being said, and, as we'll see, no payoff in it either.

So what does CAT reading involve? Broadly stated, it involves reading to identify 3 general elements: topic and scope, the author's purpose and passage structure, and the author's voice.

[Subodh Kant]

Topic and Scope

As you work through the first few sentences of a passage, you need to determine the topic. If it's a science passage, what branch of science is it about? If it's astronomy, what part of astronomy? Stars?

Now, as to scope. Think of scope as a narrowing of the topic. If the topic is industrial safety regulations, what narrower definition can we present that still describes all of the passage? Is there a comparison to another type of safety regulation? Is there a comparison between safety regulations in different historical eras? Is there an analysis of the regulations' histories? Or is the passage concerned only with a small aspect of the regulations—the ones pertaining to pregnant workers, for example?

Notice the questions in the previous paragraph. They may not read well, but we left them that way for a reason. Those questions illustrate the kind of thinking you'll need to do as you work through a passage on Test Day. Once you have the topic and narrowed down its scope, you have finished step 1. But what then? You still don't have a firm grasp of the passage.

[Subodh Kant]

Author's Purpose and Structure

Almost every Reading Comp question hinges on your ability to step back from the text and analyze why the author is writing in the first place. The CAT demands that you figure out the author's purpose and the passage structure, because that's the best way for the test makers to test how you think about the prose you read.

Like most sophisticated writing, the prose you will see on the CAT doesn't reveal its secrets so explicitly. Authors always have a purpose, of course, and always have a structural plan for carrying out that purpose, though they don't often announce them. That's your job, as the reader.

Baldly laying out the why and how of a passage up front isn't a hallmark of CAT Reading Comp passages. And even more important (as far as the test makers are concerned), if ideas were blatantly laid out, the test makers couldn't ask probing questions about them. So, in order to set up the questions—to test how we think about the prose we read—the CAT uses passages in which authors hide or disguise their statement of purpose and challenge us to extract it. If you came across the following first sentence of a typical passage, could you identify the topic and scope?

[Subodh Kant]

The great migration of European intellectuals to the United States in the second quarter of the 20th century prompted a transmutation in the character of Western social thought. ...........

First, what's the topic?
Second, what's the scope?
Why the author is writing?

Reply.

[Subodh Kant]

next post will be after sufficient reply

[sid_dharth]

Originally Posted by Subodh Kant

The great migration of European intellectuals to the United States in the second quarter of the 20th century prompted a transmutation in the character of Western social thought. ...........

First, what's the topic?
Second, what's the scope?
Why the author is writing?

Reply.

According to me:
Topic :- The topic of the passage is regarding the migration of European intellectuals to the US.
Scope :- The scope of the passage is to discuss the effects of the migration on social thought.
Why the author is writing is to elaborate on the topic and the scope.

[Subodh Kant]

Originally Posted by sid_dharth

According to me:
Topic :- The topic of the passage is regarding the migration of European intellectuals to the US.
Scope :- The scope of the passage is to discuss the effects of the migration on social thought.
Why the author is writing is to elaborate on the topic and the scope.

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