How to Prepare Reading Comprehension for Banking Exams

Reading Comprehension turns out to be Achilles heel of candidates in verbal section of banking recruitment exams. Today we will see why is this section so important and how can you ace it.

Why is Reading Comprehension Important?

It has never been omitted in Verbal section of any banking recruitment exam in recent times
To solve RC questions you don't need any knowledge beforehand.
Although its time consuming, the accuracy of RC is 80% and above.
Due to its high accuracy and repetition, it acts as a game changer in clearing sectional cut off in English section of banking recruitment examination.

How You Can Ace Reading Comprehension?

We have prepared a list of few tips and strategies which can be applied to solve reading comprehension questions quickly with high accuracy in your upcoming banking recruitment examination.

There can be two RCs in one paper.
If you have to clear English sectional cutoff without breaking a sweat, attempt all RC questions.
However if less time is remaining and there are more than one Reading Comprehension questions, pick the one based on the following tips:
- Choose the RC which is smaller. This will decrease the time taken to read the article and hence you will have more time to answer the questions.
- Choose the RC which is based on a topic of your understanding: For example if you are an engineering graduate, it makes sense to go for topics related to engineering, construction or chemicals. Avoid venturing into finance, economy etc. Same applies for graduates from any field. Choose the topic related to your field of interest.
- Try and figure out the tone of the author: is it formal or informal. Identify what the author wants to convey and if you can relate yourself to it, go for it.
After you have selected a passage, have a quick glance on its content. This means going through it quickly.
After that read the questions. Since you had a glance, you will be able to discover the answer to the question quickly in the passage.
Generally questions asked and information given in the passage is linked. What it means is that first question may have relevance in the first paragraph and so on.
To know the main idea of the passage, read the first and last paragraph of the passage.
For answering vocabulary questions in RC, read the sentence the word is present in and without looking over at the options, think about the context that word is used in. Then check the options and the nearest assumption is your answer.
Don't ever use past knowledge about the topic to answer any questions.
For answering quickly you need to improve your reading speed. Read articles in newspaper and practice speed reading tips.
Avoid extreme answers.

The article is written by Vaibhav Mehta, Education Consultant at www.MockBank.com, a Bengaluru based online test preparation company for government/PSU jobs

Also Read: