Arun Sharma is a name that every CAT aspirant surely knows of. He is the well-known author of two of the most sought after books on CAT preparation, namely, ‘How to prepare for Quantitative Aptitude for the CAT’ and ‘How to prepare for Data Interpretation & Logical Reasoning for the CAT’. Arun has prepared thousands of students for several exams, who have gone on to crack them. He has himself not been able to give up the CAT ‘keeda’ and is a serial-CAT-taker, who has been cracking the exam for the past 14 years. He has over 10 titles to his name, and over 1.5 million copies of his books have been sold till date.
Team met Mr. Arun Sharma, CEO at Mindworkzz & Author at Tata McGraw Hill Education to discuss various nitty gritties of Quantitative Ability, Data Interpretation & Logical Reasoning. Here are the excerpts :
Mr. Arun Sharma - QA basically means that you are trying to resolve whatever mental inefficiencies you have in different QA situations. A 100 percentiler has the best reaction to any possible conceivable situation, a 75 percentiler has a lot of missing and poorer reaction. The process of acing the QA section is about identifying the specific things going to be asked to it and every chapter has a set list of things that can be thrown at the students. If you can sort this out in your mind and have the best reaction to every possible situation, there is no need to fear this section at all.
It is not about how many questions you solve and how much work you are doing on a chapter. It’s about what you are learning out of what you are doing. This is the bigger challenge for students. For instance, this question in CAT, 4x-17y=1, the question asked how many solutions does this have, for x and y being positive integers less than 1000. In order to solve this, you should be able to trace that x-13 and y-3 will be the first solution to this, once you trace this, then you should know that the next solution for x will be +17 and for y will be +4. A 100 percentiler will be able to see this arithmetic progression immediately whereas a 75 percentiler won’t be able to see this.
Mr. Arun Sharma - For the DI section, the kind of questions asked in CAT nowadays, are interpretation or logic based questions. So, you have to perceive through the triggers, the language of the question. In every DI question, there will be some embedded mathematical logic, which the students need to perceive and understand. Typically, in DI, the embedded mathematical logic will be from Averages, Percentages, Ratio or Numbers.
Mr. Arun Sharma - Both reasoning and DI are abstract and are skill oriented subjects. For instance, to study a subject such as Physics, one can read books and theory, problems and so on, whereas to learn swimming, you need to experience it by jumping in the water, there’s not much of theory involved. Similarly, DI and reasoning, both are not theory based subjects but experiential subjects. What I tell my students is that if they do 300-400 sets of varied difficulty levels and types with varied experiences of problem solved, they would have faced almost everything that the CAT is likely to throw at you.