Word Wise

Updated on: Monday, November 02, 2009

You can adopt two kinds of strategies to improve your test scores in the verbal ability and reading comprehension section of the CAT —
short-term strategies and medium to long-term strategies. No matter which strategy you decide to adopt, it is crucial to remember that your ability to read and comprehend English depends on your efficiency in the language at various levels. Thus, in order to improve your scores, it is imperative that you gauge your expertise at each of these levels.

LANGUAGE LEVELS
Generally, aptitude exams like the CAT, test a candidate’s proficiency at each of the following levels: word level, sentence level (viz multiple words), paragraph level (multiple sentences) and passage level (multiple paragraphs). Besides, these tests also assess your expertise at the chapter level (multiple passages) and book level (multiple chapters). In this article, we will be focussing on how to maximise your word power.

WORD POWER
Over the past few years, CAT and other management entrance exams in India have laid more emphasis on a candidate’s functional knowledge of words rather than his/her ability to memorise words by rote learning.
Here is what you need to do in order to improve your comprehension of words:

1.Know your current ability: Judge the level of your vocabulary through your understanding of general articles in a newspaper or a magazine. Any newspaper or magazine article is written for the average reader. Hence, if you are unable to comprehend such an article, it indicates that you have a poor vocabulary. So make a note of the number of words you fail to understand in an article of around 1000 words. While doing this, there might be two types of words you will be struggling to understand:

a- Words that you don’t know but can understand because of its context in the passage.
b- Words that you are unfamiliar with and that prove as a hurdle to your comprehension of the passage.

The number of words in both the above mentioned categories would give you an indication of the level of your vocabulary. A person with good skills in language would be able to go through a 1000-1500 word passage and come across a maximum of nine words that he or she does not understands.

A newspaper would be perfect to start with. In fact, if you conduct an analysis of the CAT and other management aptitude exams, and evaluate the kind of words they required students to be familiar with over the last few years, you would realise that there is actually no word that you might miss out on, if you read an English daily for a period of six to 12 months.

2. Note down the words and memorise their meanings — not through dictionary definitions, but by attaching a visual value to each word

3.It might also be a good idea to look up the thesaurus and group words with similar meanings so that you can memorise more words through one word.

Perform this exercise until you reach a point where the number of unknown words, in every 1000-1500 word article, comes down to a single digit number. Lastly, apart from words, you should also look at developing your knowledge of English by going through idioms, phrases and phrasal verbs. Refer to a good dictionary or a list of phrasal verbs, which you could download from the internet, for this purpose.

Timesofindia

Word Wise

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