- Verbal Ability and Reading Comprehension
- Reading comprehension carries the great majority of this section — passages drawn from the humanities, social sciences, science and business, with questions on inference, tone, main idea and the author’s position rather than on retrieval. The verbal ability remainder covers para jumbles, para summary, odd sentence out and occasionally sentence completion. Vocabulary and grammar are rarely tested directly.
- Data Interpretation and Logical Reasoning
- Data interpretation through tables, bar and line graphs, pie charts, caselets and mixed representations, frequently with missing data to be deduced. Logical reasoning through arrangements, distributions, scheduling, tournaments, network diagrams, Venn diagrams and puzzles built on constraints. Almost everything comes in sets of four to six questions built on a common structure.
- Quantitative Ability — Arithmetic
- Percentage, ratio and proportion, averages and mixtures, profit and loss, simple and compound interest, time and work, time speed and distance. Arithmetic consistently carries the largest share of this section, which is fortunate, because it is also the most learnable part of it.
- Quantitative Ability — Algebra and Number Systems
- Linear and quadratic equations, inequalities, functions and graphs, logarithms, surds and indices, progressions; and number systems covering factors, remainders, divisibility, base systems and last-digit problems.
- Quantitative Ability — Geometry and Modern Mathematics
- Lines and angles, triangles, circles, polygons, coordinate geometry, mensuration of plane and solid figures, and trigonometry at a basic level; along with permutations and combinations, probability, and set theory.
The most useful thing to know about the CAT syllabus is how little of it is exotic. Almost everything is school mathematics and ordinary English comprehension. The difficulty comes from the application — unusual framings, multi-step reasoning and severe time pressure — which means the productive preparation is practice rather than the acquisition of new content.
The reasoning section deserves a note of its own, because it is the one where the word syllabus is most misleading. Sets are built to be unfamiliar — a scheduling puzzle wrapped in an unusual context, a data set with a rule you have to infer. There is no list of set types to learn. What transfers between sets is the process: read the whole set before calculating, represent the constraints, identify what is actually being asked, and decide within two minutes whether it is worth your forty.
Difficulty is not the same as advanced content
Almost nothing in CAT sits above the school curriculum. What makes the paper hard is that ordinary material is asked in unfamiliar ways, under sectional time pressure, with more questions than anyone can attempt. Candidates who respond by seeking harder content are treating the wrong variable — the fix is fluency and judgement, not a more advanced textbook.
