150 days to CAT 2013: Develop logic to score high in LR

Do you look for logic in everything that happens around you? If yes, you have all good chances to score high in the Logical Reasoning (LR) section of Common Admission Test (CAT).

With 150 days left for CAT 2013, your CAT preparation strategy must also include a comprehensive lay-out on the Logical Reasoning. Though the section carries 10-11 questions as part of the Verbal Ability section in CAT, Aspirants generally dont pay as much attention to it as they do for other sections like Quant and Verbal.

In fact, a good scoring in Logical Reasoning section may ease scoring pressure on your Verbal questions. Also, the Logical Reasoning needs less effort than other sections.

What is LR?
The LR questions in CAT, which is more pointing and value added, examines your ability to find logic.
Human brain is considered superior because it has the power to reason. It can distinguish between right and wrong and can pick out the relevant from the irrelevant. Logical Reasoning (LR in short) therefore, becomes a guide to good decisions by following a systematic thought process. The questions in this section are based on the natural human instincts.

A little logical understanding of the reasoning based questions can dramatically improve your final CAT score and percentile hence opening admission opportunities for you in IIMs and other top B-schools. Number of LR

Question in CAT
CAT, since 2010 has been reduced to two sections instead of three with 30 questions in each section. Logical Reasoning has been clubbed with Verbal Ability and this section now consists of 30 questions 20 on Verbal Ability and 10 on Logical Reasoning to be solved in 70 minutes.

Each question in this section gives you equal weightage i.e. 3 marks for every right answer. However, a penalty of 1 mark (one third of the credit marks) is imposed for every wrong answer.

Logical Reasoning alone, with 10 questions may fetch you a credit of 30 marks. A power-performance in the section can give you much comfort despite your low performance in the remaining questions in Verbal Ability section. An overall 20-21 right answer in the Verbal Ability section can fetch you more than 95 percentile in the section. Targetting a combination of 10 LR and 10 VA may also give you more than 3 minutes for one question. However, you should keep your mind open to attempt all the questions.

LR syllabus:
The syllabus of Logical Reasoning is much scattered or undefined. This makes it difficult for CAT Aspirants to systematically organise their study pattern. The vocabulary used in logical reasoning questions is also different from those used in Verbal Ability. Therefore, it is imperative that you must have the knowledge of terminologies used in this part.

Your success, however, in LR section will depend on understanding different types of questions and practicing them as much as possible. But despite all this, you may still find a new type of question or topic which had never been asked so far. You should tackle such question with an open mind and logic that you apply in any random situation.

The question are generally based on Seating Arrangements, Matching Puzzles, Constraint-based Arrangements, Blood Relations Family Tree, Syllogism, Proposition based followed by either deductive or inductive argument, Assumptions, Statements, Sets, Binary logic, Venn Diagrams, Clocks and Calenders etc.

There are also certain topics in Verbal Ability section like inserting the last sentence of paragraph, out of context sentence in a paragraph, analogy words and sentences etc. that may be included in the Logical Reasoning section. If that happens the questions from Core English gets more space in the Verbal Ability section as a few topics from this move into the Logical Reasoning.

The author of this article Mr S K Agarwal is a CAT Expert, a seasoned CAT trainer with over 25 years of experience, & author of many CAT books. He also guides Verbal Ability Section to CAT Aspirants through MBAUniverse.com online coaching classes.

MBAUniverse.com offers a comprehensive preparation package coupled with over 200 online interactive classes with Top CAT experts including from IIMs for CAT 2013 preparation.