CAT 2025 Lesson : Reading Comprehension I - Identifying the Author's Viewpoint
3. Identifying the Author's Viewpoint
Now that we know the types of RCs, and the key parts to focus on, we can combine these techniques to ensure that we are able to identify the key points of the passage and the author's viewpoint. You should answer Inferential questions only after you have identified the author's viewpoint. This also helps for Direct and Meaning questions, as we should be choosing an option in keeping with the author's viewpoint.
Understanding the tone of the passage is important for this, so that you can identify if the author is speaking literally or sarcastically. You can also understand the points that the author uses to drive home the main point (e.g. facts, logic or emotional arguments). The common tones are covered in detail in this lesson, so you can use that to help you understand the passage in more detail.
Let us identify the key points in a passage, and use that to identify the key message.
3.1 Key points
Noting the the key points in the passage while reading helps us with understanding the passage in detail. We can identify the author's PoV (point of view), retain facts which are useful for Direct questions and generally understand what the author is trying to convey.
Focus on the first sentence and paragraph, the first sentence in each paragraph and the concluding paragraph (or 2-3 sentences). If it works, you can also note down the key points – try using connectors and symbols to help you visualise the passage. You can use the techniques and symbols which we have shown in the solved RCs. You can also try and summarise each paragraph as you read it, just repeating the key points.
You should have already practiced this for the lessons on Summary and Inference. Let us try some more examples.
Example:
The cult of the iPhone and what it signifies about its owner makes it one of the most defining cultural objects of the 21st century. Because we rely on our phones for so much of modern existence, people are seen clutching them like bars of gold going to and fro their daily activities. People FaceTime while walking down the street. On any given evening at a restaurant, six phones will lay on a table during dinner. “Swipe” is a word in everyone’s daily lexicon. Ten years ago, these types of behaviours would have looked truly insane, but today they are the omnipresent reminders of the iPhone.
Key points
(1) The iPhone sends a defining image about its owner.
(2) Phones are considered as precious as gold today.
(3) People use phones constantly.
Author's PoV – the author believes that people cannot live without their phones. She suggests that this addiction is unhealthy (usage of cult, insane).
Example:
The Rohingya are a Muslim minority residing in Rakhine, an impoverished state of Myanmar. Once they lived peacefully with their Buddhist, Hindu and other neighbours. Over the past half a century, however, the group has often become the target of nationalist propaganda campaigns claiming they are dangerous interlopers. The United Nations, Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch and other independent groups have documented decades of abuse and discriminatory public policy against the group amounting to persecution. Countless Rohingya are at risk of preventable deaths in refugee settlements and remote areas unreachable by humanitarian aid workers. The total number sheltering in camps in Bangladesh has reached about 700,000. The number of people displaced over the past three weeks alone could represent more than a third of the estimated 1.1 million believed to reside in Myanmar.
Key points
(1) The Rohingya are probably poor as they are living in an impoverished area.
(2) They are being unfairly targeted (we infer unfairly because they have been described as living peacefully).
(3) Recognised international bodies have proof that they are being persecuted and forced to leave Myanmar (inferred from refugees and sheltering in Bangladesh).
Author's PoV – the author is using facts and numbers to establish the fact that the Rohingya are at considerable risk, being threatened by their own countrymen.
Example:
As regards materialistic atomism, it is one of the best-refuted theories that have been advanced, and in Europe there is perhaps no one in the learned world so unscholarly as to attach serious signification to it, except for convenient everyday use. The Poles Boschovich and Copernicus have hitherto been the greatest and the most successful opponents of ocular evidence. For, while Copernicus has persuaded us to believe that the earth does not stand fast, Boschovich has taught us to abjure the belief in the last thing that stood fast – in substance, in matter.
Key points
(1) Material atomism is incorrect as it has been refuted extremely well.
(2) This theory is not significant, and is only used for convenience.
(3) Boschovich and Copernicus have been the most successful opponents of ocular (seen) evidence.
Author's PoV – the author establishes that materialistic atomism has been disproved successfully.
Example:
Determinism, in the most common philosophical sense of the term, is “the theory that everything that happens must happen as it does and could not have happened any other way” (Cambridge Online Dictionary, 2019). This means that everything that happens was bound to happen including human actions, and this implies that choice is some sort of illusion. If determinism is true, this shatters our fundamental understanding of ourselves and the universe, not to mention our moral practices. Nevertheless, the conclusion determinists themselves come to concerning its implications for moral responsibility are not always the same.
Key points
(1) Determinism means that everything which happened had to happen.
(2) This applies to our actions as well, implying that choice does not exist.
(3) This inference shatters many of our existing views, including our belief in morality and ethics.
Author's PoV – the author describes how determinism (the belief that everything which happens cannot be changed), denies choice and therefore, causes a moral or ethical crisis.
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