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• Home Industry & Economy - Education Master of PowerPoint
• News Update CAT's around the corner!
Empires are built first i
The New Manager S. Balasubramanian mind!
Read all the questions, that's the golden rule.
• Front Page CAT's around the corn

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DO NOT WORRY about how tough the paper is. Difficulty level does not matter. If a
• Brand Line paper is tough, it is tough for every one.
• Mentor With just a week to go to the CAT, it is very important for a
• Life candidate to remind oneself of the fundamental principles that
• Canvas produce success at the CAT. In this article, I shall evolve a
simple strategy for each section. The objective of the strategy is
• Praxis
to ensure that one reads all the questions and attempts those
• Urban Pulse questions that are easy and not-too-lengthy.
• Brand Quest Divide the time available between Verbal Ability and Reading
• The New Comprehension. While dividing your time, give enough time to
Manager RC so that you may go through at least all-but-one passage. If
Stocks a paper contains 4 passages with 3500-4000 words of reading
and containing around 40-50 per cent of the questions in this
• Quotes section, we suggest that you give it around 25-30 minutes out
• SE Diary of the total of 45 you may allot to this section. We normally also
suggest that a student first tackles the Verbal Ability based
• Scoreboard
questions, not because they are easy, but because they involve
• Open-End less of an "investment" of time. Within VA, go through different
Mutual Fund sets in the increasing order of difficulty level — easy types such
Cross Currency as "fill-in-the-blanks" or "replace the given phrase" first and
tough types like para-jumbling and "restate-the-meaning-of-
• Rates the-paragraph" later.

Shipping While answering VA, do bear in mind that you either recognise
the answer in one careful reading or you do not know the
 • Ports answer at all. You are not going to be able to work out the
answer (the way you do in quant) based on the information
Archives
provided, unless of course you are trying to figure out which of
two close answer choices is better. So DO NOT PONDER TOO
• Yesterday LONG over any particular question. It is just a waste of precious
• Datewise time. Skip the questions you are not able to answer after a
• Resources reasonable time and move on. It is important to cover the VA
within the 15-20 minutes you allot to it.
• In Focus
• In Depth In the RC part of this section, first glance at all the passages to
get an idea of the topic of each passage. In case you find topics
Top of Form
with which you are more comfortable, it may help to do them
first. In any case, remember that you can give only around 8-10
minutes per passage including reading and answering
w w w .blonnet.co questions. So do not linger too long over any passage or
question.
The Quantitative Ability section usually consists of a large
proportion of individual questions with a couple of sets with two
to three questions each.
Search
The best way to approach this section is to remind oneself that
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the objective is simply to read all the questions. This translates
to 30 questions (CAT 2005) in 45 minutes.
1 If there are one-mark and two-mark questions, as suggested in
an earlier article, divide the time available according to the
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number of questions, maybe with a little skew towards the two-
mark questions. In a quant section on the CAT 2005 pattern,
this would mean around 15 minutes for the 10 one-mark
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questions and 30m minutes for the 20 two-mark questions.

GALT:#008000;G The toughest part of the quant section, however, is not dividing
time in this manner but ensuring that one actually implements
the plan. An effective way of doing so is to mentally divide the
en
section into smaller parts with smaller and more achievable
goals.
blonnet.com
Instead of looking at the quant section as "30 questions in 45
Bottom of Form
minutes", we need to see it as 5 "sub-sections", each of six
questions to be done in nine minutes.
Group Sites
Within each "sub-section", define your goal as reading every
question and answering only those questions that you find easy.
• The Hindu
Do a mid-course review when you complete the 3rd question to
• The Hindu
ePaper
ensure that you are on track and to take corrective action if you
are not.
• Business Line
If in 9 minutes, you do not complete the 6th question, move on
• Business Line
ePaper to the next sub-section. This will ensure that your errors in time
utilisation get limited to that sub-section alone.
• Sportstar
• Frontline
The Data Interpretation section usually consists of many
sets of questions, though there may also be a few individual
• The Hindu
reasoning questions. In the last few years, there have been a
 eBooks number of puzzles in the DI section.
• The Hindu To crack these and answer any question at all, it is essential
Images
that you invest a good amount of time analysing the data set. It
may therefore not be possible for you to treat the questions
individually and directly apply the principle of reading all the
questions.
A good substitute is to read all the sets. Quickly assess each set
for the level of effort that would be required to solve it and
choose those sets that you can handle in the time available.
It might be better to concentrate on three to four sets that you
are able to understand and solve them patiently rather than to
run helter-skelter looking for easy questions within all sets.
Be prepared to spend around seven to eight minutes on each
set that you decide to answer.
In the remaining sets, however, look at all the questions in the
light of the data provided and look for easy pickings.
Sometimes, a complicated looking data set may conceal some
very easy questions.
Give a reasonable amount of time to individual questions. Some
of them are sometimes very easy. In case the paper has five
individual questions out of a total of 30, be prepared to give
them a good seven to eight minutes.
A last-minute summary
It always helps to have the key points in the form of a short
summary. Likewise, let us put down once again, all the key
learnings we have had over the four articles on strategy.
Do not worry about how tough the paper is. Difficulty level does
not matter. If a paper is tough, it is tough for every one.
Start the paper by calmly glancing through it and forming your
time division plan across sections. Since all sections are equally
important, divide your time appropriately, maybe even equally.
Have a 15-20 minute buffer at the end to make-up for
questions you were not able to complete in the first round.
Start with a section in which you are comfortable and will
quickly notch up a few marks.
In each section, ensure that you give sufficient time to all the
different types of questions. There could be easy questions
anywhere. You cannot afford to miss any.
Do not forget the Golden Rule - READ ALL THE QUESTIONS
The bells are tinkling. The CAT will be here in 6 days. To
all you aspirants - Here's wishing you all the best in CAT
2006.
(The writer, an alumnus of IIT-Madras and IIM-A, 1998 batch,
is Director, Chennai Centre, T.I.M.E., an education and student
 training/counselling organisation. He may be contacted at
chennai@time4education.com)
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