How to read a CAT RC passage: structure, map and evidence

Reading comprehension is the largest part of VARC, and how you read decides how you score. CAT passages are dense and often on unfamiliar subjects. Read them the way you read news, quickly and for the gist, and your answers will rest on impressions. Read them for structure, and your answers will rest on evidence.

This guide sets out a method, applies it to a full original passage, and gives you a practice passage to try it on.

Read for structure, not for facts

Every argued passage has a shape. The author presents something, questions or supports it, gives examples, perhaps limits the claim, and reaches a view. Your job while reading is to notice what each paragraph does, not to memorise what it says.

Common paragraph roles:

• Introduces a topic or a common view.
• Presents the author's view.
• Gives evidence or an example.
• Raises an objection or a counter-argument.
• Limits or qualifies a claim.
• Concludes or proposes something new.

The details you can always look up again. The structure is what lets you answer main-idea, purpose and inference questions without rereading everything.

Track the author

The most common RC error is confusing a view the author describes with a view the author holds. Many CAT passages open with a position only to take it apart.

Build a paragraph map

After each paragraph, pause for two seconds and give it a label of three to six words in your head, or on the scribble pad in mocks. At the end you should be able to state the main point in one sentence. If you cannot, skim the first and last sentences of each paragraph again before you look at the questions.

Questions first or passage first?

• Passage first suits most candidates. Read carefully once, build the map, then answer.
• A quick glance at the question stems (not the options) can tell you whether to watch for tone, a specific example or the main idea. It takes about 15 seconds.
• Reading the options before the passage is usually a mistake. Wrong options plant ideas that the passage does not support.

Try both approaches over a few weeks of timed practice and keep whichever gives you better accuracy.

Timing

For a passage of 500–700 words with four questions, budget about 6–7 minutes: 3–4 minutes to read and map, then about a minute per question. The time you invest in careful reading comes back in faster answers.

A worked passage

Read this original passage using the method, then check the map and questions below.

It is a commonplace that something is always lost in translation. The phrase is usually offered as a lament, as though the ideal translation were a perfect copy and every actual translation a damaged one. On this view, the translator's virtue is invisibility: the less we notice the translator, the better the work.

The trouble with this picture is that it assumes the original has a single, fixed meaning waiting to be carried across. Few serious readers believe that about the texts they know best. A poem read at twenty and again at fifty is not quite the same poem; readers in different centuries have found in the same play a comedy, a tragedy and a political tract. If the original does not hold still for its own readers, it is odd to demand that a translation reproduce it exactly.

None of this licenses the translator to do as they please. A translation that ignores the grammar of its source, or smooths every difficulty into familiar idiom, fails in a different way: it gives readers not a foreign work but a flattering reflection of their own language. The most admired translations tend to preserve some strangeness, such as a syntax that bends the target language slightly, or a word left untranslated because no equivalent exists.

Seen this way, translation is less a copy than a reading, and like any reading it can be careless or attentive, narrow or generous. What is lost is real, but so is what is gained: a text made to speak in a new language has also been made to show what it could not show in its first.

The map:

1. Common view: translation is loss; the good translator is invisible.
2. Objection: the original has no single fixed meaning (poem, play examples).
3. Limit: that does not mean anything goes; good translations keep some strangeness.
4. Author's view: translation is a reading, with gains as well as losses.

Notice the signals: "It is a commonplace" and "On this view" (a view to be challenged), "The trouble with" (the turn), "None of this licenses" (the limit), "Seen this way" (the conclusion).

Question 1

Which of the following best expresses the central idea of the passage?

(a) Translations inevitably lose the meaning of the original and should be read with caution.
(b) Translators should feel free to adapt texts to the idiom of their own language.
(c) Great literary works mean different things to readers at different ages.
(d) Translation is better understood as an interpretive reading that can lose and also add, than as an imperfect copy.

Answer: (d). It matches paragraph 4 and covers the whole argument.

• (a) is the common view from paragraph 1, which the author argues against.
• (b) is contradicted by paragraph 3: smoothing everything into familiar idiom is a failure.
• (c) is true in paragraph 2 but only as support. It is too narrow to be the central idea.

Question 2

The author mentions a poem "read at twenty and again at fifty" in order to:

(a) show that readers grow wiser with age.
(b) argue that poetry is harder to translate than prose.
(c) support the claim that an original text does not have one fixed meaning.
(d) suggest that older readers prefer translations.

Answer: (c). The example sits right after the claim that few readers believe in a single fixed meaning.

• (a) reads a value judgement into the example. The passage says the poem changes, not that the reader improves.
• (b) compares poetry with prose, which the passage never does.
• (d) has nothing to do with the passage.

Question 3

The author would most likely say that a translation which renders every difficult phrase into smooth, familiar idiom:

(a) comes closest to the ideal of an invisible translator.
(b) fails because it hides what is foreign in the original.
(c) is acceptable because the original has no fixed meaning.
(d) is more faithful than one that keeps unusual syntax.

Answer: (b). Paragraph 3 says such a translation gives "a flattering reflection" of the reader's own language instead of a foreign work.

• (a) may describe the common view, but the author does not endorse that ideal.
• (c) is a distortion: paragraph 3 opens by saying the argument does not license the translator "to do as they please".
• (d) reverses the author's preference for preserved strangeness.

Practice passage

Read this original passage, build a map, and answer the questions.

Museum labels have grown shorter. Curators, told that visitors spend only seconds before each object, now write fifty words where they once wrote three hundred. The change is defended as respect for the visitor's time. But it rests on a curious inference: that because visitors read little, they want to read little. An equally plausible reading of the same observation is that the old labels were badly written, dense with dates and catalogue language, and that visitors skipped them for that reason. Shorter labels in the same style would solve nothing. The better question for a museum is not how many words a label should have, but whether any visitor would miss them if they were gone.

1. The author's main criticism of the trend towards shorter labels is that it:
   • (a) ignores the needs of expert visitors.
   • (b) draws a doubtful conclusion from how briefly visitors look at objects.
   • (c) was forced on curators by tight budgets.
   • (d) makes museums less educational than before.
2. The author mentions "dates and catalogue language" in order to:
   • (a) offer another explanation for why visitors read little.
   • (b) show that older labels were more accurate.
   • (c) criticise the research done by curators.
   • (d) argue that labels should leave out dates.
3. Which of the following, if true, would most weaken the curators' reasoning as the author presents it?
   • (a) Most visitors to museums are tourists.
   • (b) Shorter labels are cheaper to print.
   • (c) In surveys, visitors say they prefer short labels.
   • (d) Visitors spend much longer reading well-written labels, whatever their length.

Answers:

1. (b). The author calls the reasoning "a curious inference". (a) and (c) are never mentioned. (d) is broader than anything the author claims.
2. (a). It introduces the "equally plausible reading": visitors skipped labels because they were badly written. (b) and (c) distort the point, and (d) is too specific; the author does not say dates should go.
3. (d). If visitors read good labels at length, then brief reading reflects poor writing, not a wish to read less. (a) and (b) are irrelevant to the inference. (c) supports the curators instead of weakening them.

What to do next

• For the next ten passages you practise, write a four-line map before answering.
• After each passage, note the line that supports every correct answer.
• Learn the question types in CAT RC question types.
• Practise inference questions next, where evidence matters most.