CAT: Focus on quantitative, data interpretation

BANGALORE: The series on CAT 2011 today focuses on how one needs to approach the quantitative analysis and data interpretation section develop speed man of the CAT exam. Career experts have shared pointers on how to prepare for this section.

With a month to go for CAT 2011, the key to solving quantitative questions is to have a good and thorough knowledge of basic maths concepts  ie, short cuts to answer questions. For data interpretation questions, one has to be very comfortable with numbers, charts etc and be very good with mental calculations, says Abhishek Jha of learnhub.com.


He further advises that one should try and practise a data interpretation problem everyday, reading and analysing stories which consist of graphs and pie charts in business sections of newspapers. Jha says that one should start practising by taking individual sectional tests from sample papers, under strict time constraints and here one should focus on achieving accuracy, while concentrating on speed. A lot of these practice tests are found online. 

Ajay Arora of TIME advises one must bookmark questions which appear familiar. “Try and attempt the question that are your strength. Among the data interpretation  questions answer the caselets with which one is familiar with, and one can spend up to 4 minutes in analysing a caselet,” adds Arora.

If after four minutes there is no progress in understanding then it would be wise to leave the questions, he says. In this section, 16-19 attempts at questions with 90 per cent accuracy is enough to secure 97 percentile and above in this section. “One must try and avoid making wild guesses, when attempting these questions as CAT has 1/3 negative marking,” adds Arora. Wednesday’s article will focus on how to prepare and tackle section two of the paper - verbal ability and logical reasoning.