CATVerbal Ability & Reading Comprehension

Verbal Ability & Reading Comprehension for CAT

24 questions — Reading Comprehension alone is roughly 60% of the section.

📊 24 Q · 72 marks (~35% of the paper)
How toppers play this section
VARC opens the exam and sets the tone for the rest of your attempt. Reading Comprehension dominates with 4 passages of 4-6 questions each, drawn from a wide register — business, science, culture, philosophy, opinion pieces — and rewarding accurate literal reading and inference over speed-reading tricks. The three Verbal Ability sub-types (Para Jumbles, Para Summary, Odd Sentence Out) are TITA-heavy, carry no negative marking, and reward a small set of learnable techniques — pronoun and connector tracking, opening-sentence identification, central-idea distillation — far more than passive vocabulary. Because VARC is first, over-investing in one stubborn passage here taxes DILR and QA later; a firm per-passage time cap matters more in this section than in the other two.

Topic-wise weightage in CAT

Expected question counts from previous-year paper analyses. Topics with an arrow already have a full chapter.

TopicVARC · DILR · QA — one sitting, three locked sections QTier 2 QPriority
Reading Comprehension 14–15Very high
Odd Sentence Out / Sentence Placement 3–4High
Para Jumbles 3High
Para Summary 3High
Header Logo