CAT VARC Questions
Browse all CAT VARC chapters and explore topic-wise practice material.
CAT VARC PYQs — Your Questions, Answered
What VARC tests, how it's marked, and how to actually improve at Reading Comprehension.
The section splits into Reading Comprehension, which is the larger part, and Verbal Ability. Reading Comprehension uses passages followed by inference, main-idea, tone and detail questions. Verbal Ability covers para jumbles (reordering scrambled sentences), para summary (choosing the best condensation of a paragraph), and odd one out (spotting the sentence that does not belong).
Yes. Every passage and question comes from an actual CAT paper between 2017 and 2025, verified against the official paper, and each carries a written explanation.
Multiple-choice questions carry +3 for a correct answer and -1 for an incorrect one. The non-MCQ questions, which in VARC are usually para jumbles and odd one out, carry +3 for a correct answer with no negative marking.
Read for the author's argument rather than for the facts — most wrong answers are factually present in the passage but do not answer what was asked. After each passage, check not only which option was right but why each wrong option was written to be tempting; CAT builds its distractors from predictable misreadings, and learning those patterns transfers across passages.
Reading Comprehension makes up roughly two-thirds of the VARC section, typically spread across four passages of varying length, with the remaining questions covering para jumbles, para summary and odd one out. The exact split has varied between years, so treat past papers as the guide rather than a fixed rule.