CAT preparation plan – this is something that each and every aspirant planning to take CAT 2021 would have been contemplating more and more on, given there is enough time now – more than 8 months, in fact – to go to D-Day.
This is a series of posts on ‘How to score a great percentile?’ across the three different sections of CAT. We have already published one on ‘How to cross the 90th percentile in Quant?‘
In the second post on this series, let us see how one can manage to cross the 95th percentile in VARC quite conveniently.
A bit of an introduction
These are my personal stories and CAT experiences. Between 2011 and 2021, I have taken CAT consistently in most of the years. Not only that, I have been able to score the 95+ mark in VARC comfortably in several of my attempts.
How have I been able to do it?
Let me tell you straightaway that I am not a linguistic genius, who is well-versed in English. The extent of expertise I have in English is that when I see a sentence, I can sense that there could be something wrong with it.
Given all these, how did I score 95 and beyond in VARC three or four times till date?
ONLY BY READING.
I read (both past tense and present tense) a lot. If there is even one takeaway that you are gaining from this post, that is going to be this – READ.
Now that we have seen that reading is the Holy Grail, and that I have been able to master VARC just by reading a lot, let us move on to how you can do the same.
Welcome Bharath’s Reading List!
Of course, it is crystal clear that we all need to read a lot if scoring well in VARC is the goal. But what we read and how we go about reading determines where we end up at, in this section.
Bharath’s Reading List is a repository of 700+ (and counting) carefully handpicked and curated articles, consciously chosen to improve your reading and comprehension abilities. The articles posted here are diligently categorized into different genres so as to help you choose and read.
CAT preparation plan, VARC and the Reading List
Go to the Reading List and choose a genre. The following are the genres from which you can pick articles.
- Technology/Industry/Science – Part 1 and Part 2
- Psychology and Philosophy – Part 1 and Part 2
- Humans and Culture – Part 1 and Part 2
- Politics, Law and Crime – Part 1 and Part 2
- Economy and Business
- Fiction and Others
What should you do? | CAT preparation plan for VARC
- Start reading from the repository.
- Pick your favourite genre and read article after article after article after…..
- Start switching genres once you are comfortable with one.
What should you NOT do?
- Do not worry about how this habit will affect or influence your VARC score.
- Do not agonize over specifics like Sentence Rearrangement, Paragraph Summary and Sentence Elimination, and of course Reading Comprehension.
But but but… how does reading articles help?
Time and again, we have said that reading is the only way to enhance your VARC score. But we also wanted to go one notch above.
Enter Reading List Rewind!
In order to make the daily reading more meaningful and specifically relevant to building your RC abilities, we have started something called as the Reading List Rewind on our Instagram handle.
There will be a set of two to four questions from the previous day’s article that will be posted on Instagram. These questions are diligently designed to be at slightly vague, dangerously close to one another and are sometimes confusing, just like in actual CAT.
What does your VARC preparation hinge on?
One word. It starts with R and ends with D. READ. That is everything there is to scoring great in VARC.
To know how to structure your preparation towards CAT 2021 from March, head here.
Stay safe and best wishes for CAT 2021!
thankyou sir