More CAT Prep Strategy for Arts and Commerce Students

(Continued from here)

As students with arts and commerce backgrounds, you might be aware of a few of your limitations. You cannot solve all the questions. Ideally, non-engineering students should focus more on logical reasoning questions that don’t involve advanced level concepts from probability and permutations/combinations. The idea is to choose the right questions – ones with little calculation (LR) or easier DI sets (not more than two graphs, not combining pie charts and bar graphs).

For solving logical reasoning questions you need to develop a knack for them, a certain thought process. You can start with brainteasers, puzzles and Sudoku – tune your mind to analyse and reason logically. The key is to draw elaborate diagrams, graphs, etc to represent the given data. Take time and assimilate/analyse the data. Once you have all the information, picking out 4-5 right answers would take you less than a minute.

For DI questions the first technique is to understand what the question is about. Generally the questions belong to the following types: percentage differences, comparison between same base years/products, comparisons between different base years/products, etc. Then there are questions where you have to determine whether the given data is sufficient to find the missing information. To speed up your question solving, the first skill you need is to be good at is fractions and percentages. Next, hone you approximation skills. For example: 98/202 would be less than 98/200 and hence less than 49%. Also since the denominator is just being increased by 2, hence the percentage difference would be less than (1/2)%. This (98/202) should be somewhere close to 48.5%.This kind of approximation skill comes with practice and is much quicker than actual calculation work. As I said in my previous post, you can compensate for slow calculation skills by memorising useful numbers (multiplication tables, cubes, squares, cube roots, etc.)

Use logarithms – it really helps. Even if you know just 20 log values (log 1.5, log 2, log 2.5, etc) you would be able to calculate quickly (because these calculations involve addition and not multiplication). This was one thing that helped quite a few people in my batch.

Prepare for algebra from NCERT books. With linear equations always try and form your own equations and find your own solutions. For inequalities, do not go through the trouble of solving the question; eliminate a few options simply by checking the values in the given options (include the boundary values). For linear and quadratic equations, substitute the values given in the options and figure out which option satisfies the given equation. This elimination technique would work three out of five times and help you get correct answer quickly.