Verbal Ability - Reading Comprehension

Reading comprehension is an integral part of any competitive examination. It involves interpreting sentences and finding out the answers to questions that are based on the passages.

Many people have a misconception that we need to have a very strong command on English to get the answers right in comprehension tests. However, the reality is that one needs more logical reasoning skills than word power. Of course, vocabulary skills play a part but the meaning of a word depends on the sentence it is used in, so it should be determined with respect to their usage in the sentences.

The traditional method of solving questions on reading comprehension is to give a good reading to the passage and then proceed on to solving questions, however that is not a very time-efficient method, as the examinees tend to forget crucial parts of the passage by the time they start giving answers. To take care of this issue, it's well-advised that people adopt the scanning method and the search-for-reference method.

Using this method, examinees should go through the questions first, and mark those paragraphs in the passage that have references to those questions. Going through only those paragraphs can answer all the questions, as compared to reading all the paragraphs. This not only is time-efficient but also less confusing.

No matter how many tricks one learns to tackle Reading Comprehension, one important factor that cannot be ignored is that people will have to increase their word power. Vocabulary is a very important part of reading comprehensions and going through newspapers, story-books, novels and articles in English will not only boost the number of familiar words but also explain these words' usage in a sentence.

While trying to solve the Reading Comprehension questions, there might be a situation where you won't know the answer to the question. In that case, it's better to skip it and visit it later when you have some idea on it, as thinking over that question for long might make you lose precious time that can be used to solve many other questions.