How To Prepare Verbal Ability for CAT 2025? Check Now

How To Prepare Verbal Ability for CAT: The Verbal Ability and Reading Comprehension (VARC) section of the Common Admission Test (CAT) is significant to your overall percentile. For many cat aspirants, especially for students who come from a non-English medium background or are engineering students, those can find it challenging. But make no mistake, if you apply yourself and combine dedication, a strategy, good resources, and then keep practicing, you can crack CAT VARC.

The Verbal Ability section of the CAT exam aspirants' competency in English in terms of grammar, vocabulary, reading comprehension, and logical reasoning in language. It tests your knowledge of words and grammar, but also tests your analytical reading capability and your ability to interpret.

How To Prepare Verbal Ability for CAT 2025

Preparing for the CAT's Verbal Ability section is about working smart as well as hard. Here are some tried and tested, practical tips that will help you nail it.

Daily Reading is Important

Make reading newspapers (The Hindu, Aeon, The Economist, Guardian, New York Times) a daily habit. Think long-read editorials and features. Try to read boring articles because you need to get out of your comfort zone by reading boring articles. Try to read from a diverse genre. You can also check out our page called CAT daily articles where we upload 3 fresh articles daily. We take these articles from the same sources as CAT. If you want to know about the CAT previous year RC sources then you can just click on this link and read the full blog post.

Understand and Don't Memorize

There is nothing in the VARC section that you can just memorize and answer the questions. You need to understand certain concepts such as how to eliminate options, how to infer from the passage etc. You will improve on this by practicing and applying these techniques in RCs.

Practice Reading Comprehension (RC) Daily

Start with 2 RC a day and move up to 3-4 a day. Also, working on inference-based, tone-based, and factual questions. Read deeply initially and do not skip anything during preparation. These are last-minute things.

Think Error Spotting and Sentence Rearrangement

Practice Para Jumbles (PJ), Para Summary, and Odd Sentence Out. You can increase your logical sequencing by taking & identifying the subject, connectors, and 'flow'. Identifying cause-effect, contrast, and example relationships can help you with the more complex PJs.

Review and Reflect

Keep an error log. Come back to the hard questions - question the reason for the error. Review and cross-check after every mock, and adjust accordingly. Here analysis of every sectional and mock becomes very important to know your strengths and weaknesses.

CAT Verbal Ability Preparation Strategy

Your approach to VARC must be structured, regimented, and graded to your learning mode. Below is a detailed plan divided into phases:

Phase 1: Fundamentals (Month 1–2)

• Download the CAT Previous paper PDF and try to solve every single RC with full focus and analyze those properly. Do all the RCs of at least past 4 years papers.
• Reading should be approximately 30 min- 45 min, daily.
• Try to solve 2-3 Para summary and 2-3 PJ and PI each
• Try to find what worked if you got the question right and vice versa.
• Weekly aim for 1 sectional test.

Phase 2: Skills (Month 3–4)

• Try to increase the no. of questions that you are solving each day.
• Daily PS, PI and odd one out questions or verbal questions, 15–20.
• Simulating para-jumbles and summaries in timed conditions.
• Start looking for mistakes and patterns.

Phase 3: Test Readiness (Month 5–6)

• Taking full VARC sectional tests, 2 a week.
• Increase attempts while maintaining accuracy.
• Act on your decisions- what you skip on and how you attempt.
• Discuss with peers to check answers.

Phase 4: Last Month

• 1 mock VARC test per day.
• Revising your error log.
• Finalize a strategy for the D-Day.
• Short drill reading with time-based reading/revision and speed drills.
• Meditation and light exercise to channelize the mind.

CAT Verbal Ability Topics List

The CAT Syllabus is divided into several parts. We will now discuss the list of topics that the candidates must cover under the Verbal Ability and Reading Comprehension section. RC comprises about 70% of the VARC section in the CAT. The remaining 30% is made up of Verbal Logical questions like para jumbles and Odd Sentence Out.

CAT Verbal Ability Practice Questions

It is important to practice CAT Verbal Ability questions consistently to master your VA section. These questions assess more than your ability to understand grammar and vocabulary; they can assess your skills in comprehending complex texts, identifying logical relationships between texts, and arranging disjointed ideas in an organized manner.

The only way that you can ideally improve your accuracy and speed is to consistently practice all variations of verbs, including Reading Comprehension or Reading Passages, Para Jumbles, Odd Sentence Out, and Summary Writing! Practice quickens the process of identifying these modes of questioning, while your explanation of your answer will sharpen your problem-solving strategies, clarity of ideas expressed, and bolster your self-confidence to be successful in the actual exam by keeping track of your exam performance and views on the questions.

Best Books for CAT Verbal Ability

Choosing the best books for CAT Verbal Ability could be challenging, as a lot of CAT study material is available in the market, and everybody claims their suggestions as the best. Here is a list of books that our team has researched and identified as some of the best for the Verbal Ability section in the CAT exam.

How To Prepare Verbal Ability for CAT 2025: Conclusion

Succeeding in the Verbal Ability segment of CAT is a systematic and continuous deployment of reading, comprehension, and logical reasoning, not merely memorization of rules or words. Begin with laying good foundations, proceed with rigorous practice, and round out with test-smart approaches.

The VARC section is generous to those who do clear thinking, read patiently, and analyze critically. Attempting more questions is useless; attempting more questions wisely and punctually is useful. With a 360-degree plan and quality resources, a non-native English speaker can achieve a 99+ percentile in CAT VARC.