A VARC plan for CAT: six months to steady accuracy

VARC, Verbal Ability and Reading Comprehension, opens the CAT paper. In recent years it has had 24 questions. Most come from reading comprehension passages, and the rest are verbal ability questions such as para jumbles, para summaries and odd sentence out.

VARC is the section candidates most often misjudge. It looks easy because it is "just English", so people leave it for later and spend their early months on QA. But it rewards a skill that develops slowly: reading unfamiliar, dense prose quickly and understanding exactly what it says, and no more. There are no formulas to memorise. What works is sustained reading and careful review, started early.

What the section tests

Reading comprehension carries most of the marks, so it deserves most of your time. Verbal ability questions are fewer, but they are quick when practised and several carry no negative marking.

Why reading breadth matters

CAT passages come from many fields: philosophy, economics, science, history, art, psychology, sociology, technology. A candidate who reads only business news will meet unfamiliar ideas and vocabulary in the exam and slow down exactly when speed matters.

Wide reading does two things. It makes difficult topics feel ordinary, so you stay calm. And it trains you to follow an argument, noticing where an author concedes a point, where they disagree and where they conclude. That is precisely what CAT questions test. Our guide to building a reading habit explains what to read and how.

A six-month plan

If you have fewer than six months, compress months 1 and 2 into one, but do not skip daily reading.

A daily routine (one hour)

1. 30 minutes: read one long-form article or essay from a quality source, and write a two-line summary.
2. 20 minutes: two RC passages, timed.
3. 10 minutes: review every question, right and wrong.

The review is the part most candidates skip, and it is where most of the improvement happens.

A 40-minute section plan

A rough time budget for the exam and full mocks:

Many candidates do verbal ability first to bank quick TITA answers, while others start with the passage that looks most readable. Try both in mocks and keep what gives you better accuracy. The important thing is to decide before the exam, not in it.

Accuracy first

In VARC, options are close. A wrong answer usually comes from picking an option that is partly right, too extreme, or true in the world but not stated in the passage.

Here is why accuracy matters more than attempts. Compare two candidates who each get 14 MCQs right:

• Candidate A attempts 20 and gets 6 wrong: 14 × 3 − 6 = 36.
• Candidate B attempts 16 and gets 2 wrong: 14 × 3 − 2 = 40.

B scored more by attempting fewer. Aim for 75–80% accuracy in practice before you try to increase attempts.

How to review a question: a worked example

Here is a short, original para-summary question.

Libraries were once judged by the size of their collections: a library with a million volumes was, almost by definition, better than one with a hundred thousand. Digitisation has quietly overturned this measure. When a text can be retrieved in seconds from a server on another continent, what distinguishes a library is no longer what it owns but what it helps readers find, understand and trust.

Which option best summarises the paragraph?

(a) Digitisation has made libraries unnecessary.
(b) Readers no longer value libraries with large collections.
(c) With digital access, a library's worth lies less in owning texts than in helping readers find and trust them.
(d) Digitisation lets libraries own far larger collections than before.

Answer: (c). Now review each wrong option:

• (a) is too extreme. The paragraph says the measure of a library has changed, not that libraries are no longer needed.
• (b) shifts the subject. The paragraph is about how libraries are judged, not about what readers value, and "no longer value" overstates it.
• (d) is not stated and misses the point. The paragraph says ownership matters less, not that collections have grown.
• (c) keeps both halves: the old measure (owning) and the new one (helping readers find and trust).

Ask two questions for every question you review: where in the text is the answer supported, and what exactly is wrong with each other option? This habit, repeated over months, is what builds VARC accuracy. For reading passages step by step, see how to read a CAT passage.

Practice

1. Arrange these sentences into a coherent paragraph. Type the order as a four-digit number.
   • (1) Yet within a decade, the same farmers were among the fiercest defenders of the scheme.
   • (2) When the irrigation scheme was first proposed, most farmers in the district opposed it.
   • (3) They feared that canal water would reach the larger landholders first.
   • (4) What changed their minds was not persuasion but a drought that the canal-fed villages survived and others did not.
2. You have 9 minutes left in VARC and one untouched passage of four questions. Should you start it?
3. Your mock accuracy in VARC is 60% on 20 attempts. What should your next target be?

Answers:

1. 2314. Sentence 2 introduces the scheme and the opposition. Sentence 3 gives the reason ("They" refers to the farmers). Sentence 1 turns with "Yet" to the later support. Sentence 4 explains what "changed their minds", which only makes sense after the change has been stated.
2. Usually yes, if the passage looks readable. At 6–7 minutes per passage you can finish it and use the remaining time to check marked questions. If it looks very dense, attempt two or three questions you can answer from specific lines.
3. Attempt fewer, around 16, and push accuracy towards 75–80%. More right answers will follow from careful reading, not from more attempts.

What to do next

• Start 30–40 minutes of daily reading this week and keep a short log.
• Do one untimed RC passage a day and review every option.
• Learn the para jumble method from our para jumbles guide.
• Take one VARC sectional test at the end of the month and record your accuracy.