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.

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.

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.

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.

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?

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?

First, what's the topic?

The migration of European intellectuals to the United States in the
second quarter of the 20th century.

That's clear.
Second, what's the scope? (How can we narrow the topic?)
Well, the passage looks as if it will discuss the effects of this migration
on social thought.
So, using what we know about topic and scope, we can easily deduce
why the author is writing.

His purpose, we might say, is "to explore how the arrival of European
thinkers during the period 1926-1950 changed Western social
thought."

And notice the implied structure of what will follow. Don't you expect
the author to first describe the migration westward and then explain
what the "transmutation" was? (And it probably will be in that order;
CAT authors are nothing if not logical.)

The author will never say, "Here's why I write." But unless you figure
out why he is writing, you won't be able to analyze why each piece—
each paragraph and each detail—is there and how it's being used.

Test yourself: TSP

If you came across the following first sentence of a typical passage,
could you identify the TOPIC , SCOPE and PURPOSE (TSP)

1. Cyberspace is often thought of as a realm of freedom, even of fun.

Topic -
Scope -
Purpose -

2. As Asia faces the global economy of the future, it is necessary to

take stock of the once arcane issue of intellectual property.
Topic -
Scope -
Purpose -

3. The idea that the human species could alter something as huge and
complex as the earth’s climate was once the subject of an esoteric
scientific debate.
Topic -
Scope -
Purpose -

4. ‘Footie totty, ‘tennis babes’, ‘brolly dollies’ - these cliched images of

women for whom the biggest decision of the day is a leg wax or a
manicure still persist.
Topic -
Scope -
Purpose -

5. It is a leap to go from writing poems about ruins to making ruins to

represent poems, but early eighteenth century England did just this.
Topic -
Scope -
Purpose -

6. The story of jazz is a miniature history of the modern mind.

Topic -
Scope -
Purpose –

7. Warhol was one of the few artists of his time to acknowledge the
capitalist nature of art capitalism.
Topic -
Scope -
Purpose -

8. Perhaps more than any other single experience, the Irish migrations
of the nineteenth century have captured the modern popular
imagination as the most disturbing, indeed by some accounts the most
tragic, chapter in the recent history of human relocations.
Topic -
Scope -
Purpose -

9. Visiting South Korea at the end of 1998 was rather like visiting a
once-proud friend who has suddenly been engulfed by a profound
identity crisis.
Topic -
Scope -
Purpose -

10. The growth of the new nationalism and social and political
‘particularism’ – summarized by Michael Walzer in 1992 as ‘the new
tribalism’ – is one of the most profound ‘crises’ in the familiar sphere
of political culture at the end of the twentieth century.
Topic -
Scope -
Purpose -

11. The overwhelming majority of people who develop problems with

anorexia nervosa and bulimia – regardless of nationality or social class
– are female.
Topic -
Scope -
Purpose -

12. Now for the more conservative approach to the Grandmother

Paradox: time travelers don’t change the past because they were
always a part of it.
Topic -
Scope -
Purpose -

13. Montana Scalp’s provocative statement about her intentions in

writing Mrs. Dalloway has regularly been ignored by the critics, since it
highlights an aspect of her literary interests very different from the
traditional picture of the ‘poetic’ novelist concerned with examining
states of reverie and vision and with following the intricate pathways
of individual consciousness.
Topic -
Scope -
Purpose -

14. To teach is to create a space in which obedience to truth is

practised.
Topic -
Scope -
Purpose -

15. Innovations, development of new products, to extend the lines and

expand the markets of existing products by adding new features,
styles, packaging, pricing — all these inexorably belong to the arsenal
of devices by which a modern company competes.
Topic -
Scope -
Purpose -

16. Science does not grow by simple accumulation.

Topic -
Scope -
Purpose -

17. It was late October, and the lights had been dimmed in the
Beckman conference center at the University of California at Irvine.
The chief technology officer of Total Entertainment Network (TEN), a
gaming company, was demonstrating how a group of players in
cyberspace could match wits in an animated shoot-’em-up called
Quake.
Topic -
Scope -
Purpose -

18. Beijing’s trendy taverns generally have two distinct sets of

patrons.
Topic -
Scope -
Purpose -

19. Talk with ever-voluble Sun Microsystems Inc. CEO Scott McNealy,
and you may hear one of his favorite quips: “Conventional wisdom
doesn’t contain a whole lot of wisdom.” He believes it because of his
own experience.
Topic -
Scope -
Purpose -

20. With its dimpled aluminum facade and TV-screen-shaped windows,

Pittsburgh’s Alcoa Building once exemplified the power and pizzazz of
the classic corporate skyscraper.
Topic -
Scope -
Purpose –

Author's Voice

An important part of critical reading is distinguishing between factual

assertions and opinions/interpretations. It's the
opinions/interpretations that the Reading Comp passages are built on,
and you should pay the most attention to them. Let's say you come
upon a paragraph that reads:

The coral polyps secrete calceous exoskeletons, which cement

themselves into an underlayer of rock, while the algae deposit still
more calcium carbonate, which reacts with sea salt to create an even
tougher limestone layer.

A bunch of statements of fact, right? But don't focus on these facts.

Keep reading until you get to the more "abstract" author's point:
Why he's writing on the topic of coral reef formation. What should grab
your attention is the following sentence:

All of this accounts for the amazing renewability of coral reefs despite
the endless erosion caused by wave activity.

__________________________________________________
_____________________
Read More
To master understanding on whether an author is speaking in his own
voice or is recounting another persons opinion, read music or book
reviews.
__________________________________________________
_____________________

Consider how different this sentence is from the earlier, more factual
one. The phrase this accounts for should tell you, "that's the author
talking," saying, "I believe this to be proven cause-and-effect." The
same goes for the word amazing. It indicates the author's personal
interpretation. Your response to this sentence should be: "Okay. But,
how so? Where's your evidence?" In other words, as an active reader,
you are demanding support for the author's opinions. You're forcing
the author to defend, his view-to tell you what accounts for the
"amazing renewability of coral reefs."

Attacking a passage is what critical reading is all about: stepping

back from the sheer factual content, figuring out the author's views on
a topic and how she arrived at them, and looking for the evidence that
must be provided. Be on the lookout for sentences in which the
author's voice is coming through, and try to skip past the sentences
that are purely factual or simply there for support.

If you find that you don't personally agree with the author's
viewpoints, keep it to yourself. In this situation, that's irrelevant. The
questions are going to test your command of the author's views, and
you can only get in trouble by imposing your own opinions.