There are essentially two
ways of attempting to crack this section : focus on Reading
Comprehension (RC) and perform sufficiently well in , for the lack of a
better name, verbal ability (VA) (consisting of paragraph completion,
arranging sentences etc ) or vice versa. This division is based on the
rather diverse skill sets required when solving these two varieties of
questions. For being good at reading comprehension, one needs to
develop an ability to quickly scan through a large piece of writing and
be able to pick up the key issues while VA requires one to spend a
large amount of time scrutinizing each line and its meaning.

Reading
comprehensions need the individual to have a reasonably high speed of
reading and the ability to make sense in that time. The best way to
develop this ability is to read newspaper reports&articles.
Newspaper reports give one the ability to separate out the actual
important news from the unnecessary part. This is important because
typically one of the RCs involves very specific information and the
test taker has to be able to weed out the important data. Newspaper
reports on the other hand represent the other types of reading
comprehensions. These are articles which focus on a very specific topic
or an idea and seek to expand on it. Here it becomes important for the
reader to be able to understand what the author is trying to say. The
issue here is to be able to look at things from the author’s
perspective. Newspaper editorials are especially useful in practicing
reading for this kind of reading comprehension.

For the verbal
ability part, magazine articles and story books help. Magazine articles
tend not to be as organized and as streamlined as newspaper articles
and have a rather free flowing sentence structure. This makes one more
aware of the kind of sentence formations possible. This is especially
useful for paragraph ordering and sentence completion. This also helps
in building up vocabulary to a certain extent. However a more useful
way of building up vocabulary is reading story books. This though
requires a lot of time and may not be exactly what you might want to do
with few months to go for the exams, unless of course reading is your hobby.

Specifically
when it comes to VA questions, paragraph completion is possibly the
safest bet. This is because if one has done sufficient reading from
magazines and other sources and has a generic idea about sentence
relationships, one can quickly gauge the given question and also to a
certain extent checking the answers becomes easy.

With respect
to the Reading comprehensions, it might be a good idea to read the
questions once before setting out to read the comprehension. This is
especially useful when there are questions which have phrases straight
out of the article provided. This helps to identify the phrase the
first time you read the article rather than having to waste time going
over the whole thing again searching for the phrase again.

Now,
for the test taking part.  An ideal way of taking the test would be to
start with the VA part because it involves distinct questions and
therefore it gives scope for attempting more questions in a limited
period of time. Reading comprehensions on the other hand need a time
investment of at least 7-10 minutes for a set of 4/5 questions. The
good part is that if you have understood the passage completely , there
is a good chance that you’ll get all the questions right.

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