CAT 2016: Best books for VARC preparation! Toppers & Expert advice

Preparing Verbal Ability & Reading Comprehension for CAT 2016 in next 45 days may not prove to be very difficult if you get right study material and the best books to prepare and practice from.
Toppers who cracked CAT 2015 and got into IIM Ahmedabad, IIM Bangalore, FMS Delhi are unanimous on the view that it is the practice and analysis of mistakes that can take you beyond your current level of expected percentile in CAT 2016 to a much higher level.

There is no doubt that it may be difficult to build afresh on your fundamentals and concepts on Verbal Ability in next 45 days but you can strengthen them to a great extent in remaining days to CAT 2016 and crack the VARC section with high score.
VARC is considered as one of the most difficult sections especially for the candidates coming from engineering background. CAT 2015 toppers confronted VARC as their weakest section but never got tired from moving with consistent improvement. The result was that they cracked the VARC section with very high percentile. Following books, study material to crack CAT 2016 is recommended by the toppers.

Reading Comprehension
24 questions out of total 34 questions in VARC section were based only on Reading Comprehension passages. When 70% weightage is awarded only to a particular part of entire section, candidate needs to gear up to ace it with high score.
To accomplish this goal, you should go for following books & study material
-- How to Prepare for Verbal Ability and Reading Comprehension for CAT- by Arun Sharma & Meenakshi Upadhyay
-- Verbal Ability and Reading Comprehension for the CAT-by Nishit K Sinha
-- Latest RC Passages and practice questions provided by Study centres like TIME, CL among others
-- Editorial and short articles published in English news papers

Verbal Ability: Building the Basics
45 days are not enough to begin from the scratch on building your basics on English Language, Vocabulary, and correct usage says Prof S K Aggarwal, expert on Verbal Ability and mentor on CAT 2016 preparation. However, he suggests that you can improve a lot if you read and practice every day with the help of following books, online questions from various sites, apart from studying from above referred books
-- Word Power Made Easy by Norman Lewis
-- High School English Grammar & Composition by Wren & Martin
-- Regularly solve the Verbal Ability questions from your study material especially on Para summary, Jumbled Paragraphs

Toppers advise
Pranjal Agarwal, CAT 100 percentiler and student of IIM Ahmedabad advises For the Verbal Ability section, the best way to study is by reading articles in newspapers and magazines, preferably on the internet. These would help in the Reading Comprehension types of questions. For opinionated type articles, its better to follow some online forums where people write their own articles. Reading articles also help in getting an idea of sentence fluency as well. For grammar, it is preferred to purchase any book with practice questions along with material of any coaching institute.

Abhay Agarwal, CAT 99.99 percentiler & FMS Delhi student suggests My English was pathetic and also I needed to speed up my calculations in Quant to be able to attend more questions in the given time. There were several speed tests that helped me in this regard. Study Material was available online and also I borrowed some of the Arun Sharma books from my friends.

Advising further the CAT 2016 aspirants, he says I applied all my efforts in improving my English. I read 4-5 novels in a span of 1-2 months. I read novels which were not at all interesting. This reading habit helped me greatly in focussing on the RCs. I could then critically analyse the passage and could answer the questions properly. Although it took me many attempts in the mocks but finally English was one of my best sections in CAT15 Result.
Shashank Heda, CAT 99.99 percentiler and IIM Bangalore student firmly believes and suggests to CAT 2016 aspirants A few mistakes many people do is referring to multiple books/material for a topic but the strategy should be comprehensive and not exhaustive.

Also, one must not spend too much time on a single topic. Joining a test series helps a lot in analysing the areas that need more focus. Major resources for the exam include coaching centre material (to learn the theory), mock tests (to analyse section-wise performance and to improve time management) and chapter-wise mock tests. The scope of improvement in VARC was more when compared to other sections. Thus, I spent more time in solving passages and did detailed analysis of that sections result in each mock test.

Segmentalize the VARC to prepare better
There are number of segments and topics on which questions may or may not be asked in CAT 2016. While CAT 2015 had no question on Vocabulary, it can find place again in CAT 2016. It is therefore advised not to leave anything to chance.
Segmentalise VRC in following areas to prepare well-

• -- Sentence correction/ error correction on Grammar/Vocabulary words
• -- FIJ (Fact, Inference, Judgement)
• -- Contextual usage of vocabulary
• -- Para Summary
• -- Grammar/phrases/Fill in the blanks
• -- Parajumbles/Out of context sentence
• -- Reading comprehension

For the past many years, CAT has been awarding maximum weightage to RC passages and with no questions on Logical Reasoning (LR) in VRC section in CAT 2016, you should expect more number of RC questions. Better to improve your reading speed with understanding.

None of the candidates solve all the questions fearing imposition of penalty marks. As such a candidate armed with the accurate solution of 24-28 questions can get 99+ percentile in this section.
With the recent change in weightage to MCQs and non-MCQs in VARC section and scoring pattern in CAT 2016, it would be better to revise your preparation strategy accordingly to aim for a high score in modified CAT 2016 is the specific advice from Prof S K Agarwal Verbal Ability expert and mentor on CAT 2016 preparation. Since CAT 2016 is going to be convened by IIM Bangalore on December 4, 2016, only 45 days remain to prepare, practice, analyse and update the accuracy level in VARC for the exam.