1. Solving Methodology

You can follow the following steps to identify the summary. These seem like a lot of work, but you will be doing some of these simultaneously.

1) Read through the paragraph, focussing on each sentence as you read
2) Understand the author's tone and style
3) Understand the context (typically from the first sentence)
4) Highlight or repeat the key points after reading the paragraph
5) Understand the key idea or message based on these points (stating this before reading the options helps you eliminate options which do not have complete information about the passage)
6) Use any examples to hone your understanding
7) Decide the correct option by means of logical analysis
8) Eliminate any options based on factual inaccuracy, logical flaw, tone and style and precision

Off late, many CAT Summary questions are focussed on elimination. This takes a bit more time, as we need to validate each and every option with the passage.

Focussed reading is useful to understand the passage/paragraph. Knowing the key types of paragraphs will help you focus on the most important parts. For instance, you must read through fictional passages, focus especially on the first and last sentences in analytical passages, and note down key data points in data-driven passages.

Let us cover each of these steps.

2. Types of Paragraphs

Every paragraph can be read in a slightly different way, based on its type. Understanding the key types of passages helps us to read them appropriately in a single read. This will help us to identify the key points better. The type of paragraph determines how you read it, and whether you should focus on each point separately, or do you understand the meaning of the entire paragraph. These help with both accuracy and time (remember that time taken is very important in CAT).

2.1 Descriptive

These are paragraphs which describe something – such as things, people, events, ideas or concepts. These could be fictional (not true, made up), narrative (chronology of events), historical, humorous, instructive (a story with a moral or message), sentimental (emotional).

For instance,
A long time ago, when the world was much younger than it is now, people told and believed a great many wonderful stories about wonderful things which neither you nor I have ever seen. They often talked about a certain Mighty Being called Jupiter, or Zeus, who was king of the sky and the earth; and they said that he sat most of the time amid the clouds on the top of a very high mountain where he could look down and see everything that was going on in the earth beneath. He liked to ride on the storm-clouds and hurl burning thunderbolts right and left among the trees and rocks; and he was so very, very mighty that when he nodded, the earth quaked, the mountains trembled and smoked, the sky grew black, and the sun hid his face.

This paragraph is a fictional passage describing Jupiter.

For instance,
Hindsight bias occurs when people feel that they “knew it all along” — when they believe that an event is more predictable after it becomes known than it was before it became known. In other words, when we’re looking back at an event after it already happened, knowing that outcome influences our perception of the events leading up to it. We experience hindsight bias because our brains are constantly trying to make sense of the world. To do that, we’re constantly connecting causes and effects, connecting chains of events. Understanding cause and effect is an essential skill for survival, but when we succumb to hindsight bias, we oversimplify those explanations. We see unpredictable events as obvious. “I knew it all along,” we end up thinking.

This paragraph is describing hindsight bias.

2.2 Data-driven or factual

These are paragraphs which contain a fair bit of data (e.g. numbers, statistics, many facts, etc.). These could be narrative or scientific. Such passages can be from current affairs, historic, statistical or scientific passages.

For instance,
Martin Luther King, Jr. was a social activist and Baptist minister who played a key role in the American civil rights movement from the mid-1950s until his assassination in 1968. King sought equality and human rights for African Americans, the economically disadvantaged and all victims of injustice through peaceful protest. He was the driving force behind watershed events such as the Montgomery Bus Boycott and the 1963 March on Washington, which helped bring about such landmark legislation as the Civil Rights Act and the Voting Rights Act. King was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 1964 and is remembered each year on Martin Luther King, Jr. Day, a U.S. federal holiday since 1986.

This paragraph provides the timeline of Martin Luther King Jr.'s activities and its impact.

For instance,
Tesla, with a recent market capitalization of north of 520 billion, is now one of the world’s most valuable companies, worth more than quintuple the combined value of U.S. auto icons General Motors and Ford. Through sheer force of will and a healthy dose of operating genius, Musk has built an electric-auto maker and battery manufacturer that is seemingly dragging an entire industry into the 21st century—and captivated investors around the world. Over the past three years, Tesla has averaged revenue growth of 52% and it recently reported its fifth straight quarterly profit. In November, it was announced that Tesla would be added to the S&P 500 index as of Dec 1—giving the stock a further boost. That rocketed Musk’s personal net worth even higher to nearly 128 billion, according to Bloomberg—making him the world’s second wealthiest person behind Amazon’s Jeff Bezos, and slightly ahead of Bill Gates.

In this paragraph, we learn about Tesla's market capitalisation.

2.3 Analytical

These are paragraphs where the author draws a conclusion with given data – this has an additional conclusion which might not be present in merely factual paragraphs. Such paragraphs are from similar genres as data-driven ones, the difference being the style of writing. Data-driven passages will provide the data, whereas analytical ones will utilise the data to draw a conclusion.

For instance,
Progress happens over such a long period of time that it is not always apparent that things have improved. Disasters, on the other hand, happen in a flash. Their effects tend to be immediate and their impact on people and the planet are visible for everyone to see. This is why, despite strong evidence to the contrary, we tend to be obsessed with how bad things are in the world around us, rather than celebrating how much they have actually improved. Perhaps unsurprisingly, this brand of pessimism is alive and well even in the policy circles that I inhabit.

This paragraph explains why we tend to be pessimistic about the state of our world.

For instance,
WhatsApp’s decision to delay the update of its privacy policy, following a backlash from its users, is an implicit acknowledgement of the increasing role played by perceptions about privacy in the continued well-being of a popular service. Problems for the Facebook-owned app started when it announced an update to its terms of service and privacy policy, according to which users would no longer be able to opt out of sharing data with Facebook. February 8 was kept as the deadline for the new terms to be accepted. This triggered a mass exodus from WhatsApp, the likes of which it has never encountered, not even in the aftermath of the Cambridge Analytica scandal, or when the messaging app’s co-founders called it quits a few years ago. The WhatsApp policy update has clearly spooked many users, who, concerned about their privacy getting compromised, have shifted to alternative platforms such as Signal and Telegram. In recent weeks, according to media reports, messaging app Signal has topped the app store charts in India and many other countries.

This paragraph showcases the importance of user privacy for messaging apps, particularly Whatsapp.

2.4 Abstract

These are paragraphs which are from abstract topics such as psychology, sociology, philosophy, religion etc. These can be symbolic, or implicit in nature. These are opposite in nature to scientific and analytical passages.

For instance,
I call our world Flatland, not because we call it so, but to make its nature clearer to you, my happy readers, who are privileged to live in Space. Imagine a vast sheet of paper on which straight Lines, Triangles, Squares, Pentagons, Hexagons, and other figures, instead of remaining fixed in their places, move freely about, on or in the surface, but without the power of rising above or sinking below it, very much like shadows — only hard and with luminous edges — and you will then have a pretty correct notion of my country and countrymen. Alas, a few years ago, I should have said “my universe”: but now my mind has been opened to higher views of things.

This paragraph describes the fictional land of Flatland, where everything survives in two dimensional space.

For instance,
To see a World in a Grain of Sand
And a Heaven in a Wild Flower
Hold Infinity in the palm of your hand
And Eternity in an hour.
This poem seeks to explain the beauty of nature.
Poems are important because we get a poem in XAT each year.

2.5 Approach

You should approach each paragraph slightly differently. For instance, we need to focus on key points in a descriptive or narrative paragraph. For a data driven-paragraph, you should focus on the key points, while using the data to eliminate incorrect options. In an analytical passage, understanding the author's viewpoint is most important – you should use the data and examples to help you with this. In abstract passages, you need to understand the key message – this will be more difficult in abstract passages as we are not used to reading such passages.

You can read through the lesson on Reading Comprehension for more examples of types of passages.

Example 3

The passage given below is followed by four alternate summaries. Choose the option that best captures the essence of the passage.

The usual story of the Universe has a beginning, middle, and an end. It began with the Big Bang 13.8 billion years ago when the Universe was tiny, hot, and dense. In less than a billionth of a billionth of a second, that pinpoint of a universe expanded to more than a billion, billion times its original size through a process called “cosmological inflation”. Next came “the graceful exit”, when inflation stopped. The universe carried on expanding and cooling, but at a fraction of the initial rate. For the next 380,000 years, the Universe was so dense that not even light could move through it – the cosmos was an opaque, super-hot plasma of scattered particles. When things finally cooled enough for the first hydrogen atoms to form, the Universe swiftly became transparent.

(1) The Universe went through many separate expansions before cooling down.

(2) The Universe became transparent only after cooling.

(3) The Universe began with the Big Bang, then inflated, then expanded and then cooled down.

(4) The Big Bang, cosmological expansion, graceful exit and cooling happened before hydrogen was formed.

Solution

This is a descriptive paragraph, telling us about the formation of the Universe. The Universe started with the Big Bang, and then expanded rapidly (cosmological inflation). The rate of expansion came down, but the universe continued expanding and cooling. Finally, the then-dense and opaque Universe cooled enough for hydrogen atoms to form.

As the Summary options are one-sentence only, we will not be able to capture everything, so we should look for an option which has most of the Big Bang, inflation, expansion and cooling. This is mentioned in option (3). The only part missing is the density and opaqueness.

Options (1) and (2) are only speaking about a part of the paragraph – option (1) speaks about the types of expansion but misses out on the Big Bang. Option (2) only speaks about the cooling and end result. Therefore, we can eliminate these two options.

Option (4) contains all the points but is from the perspective of the formation of hydrogen – whereas this paragraph is all about the formation of the Universe. There is also a factual error where the term cosmological expansion is used instead of cosmological inflation (this would typically not be an issue, but here this is a scientific term being used.

Therefore, we can eliminate option (4) in favour of option (3).

Answer: (3) The Universe began with the Big Bang, then inflated, then expanded and then cooled

Example 4

The passage given below is followed by four alternate summaries. Choose the option that best captures the essence of the passage.

Have you played the lottery? Most don’t, but for the sake of argument, let’s say you can comprehend the astronomical odds of winning the lottery. That has never stopped you from buying the tickets. Each time you purchase it, you are hopeful, maybe even experience a thrill, a minuscule-chance to hit the jackpot to get off that hamster wheel. It feels great, even if it is just for a fleeting moment. All this to say, buying a lottery ticket or several at a nearby gas station never loses its appeal. Neither does any ritual of superstitiously picking the potential winning combination. If it did, you would have quit buying it long ago.

(1) People buy lottery tickets because of the thrill even though the odds for winning are against them.

(2) Most people buy lottery tickets because they do not understand the odds.

(3) Buying lottery tickets gives people hope and a thrill, which dissipate when they lose.

(4) Mathematically, we should not be buying lottery tickets, but we do so hoping we can win.

Solution

This paragraph is an analytical one, where the author attempts to explain why people buy lottery tickets. The author explains that people experience a thrill because of the chance to win the jackpot, and also because of any ritual associated to select a winning ticket. These thrills make people buy lottery tickets even though the odds are hugely against them.

This reasoning is summarised in option (1). It is also written precisely as compared to option (3), which is speaking about the thrill but not the odds. It also focusses more on the emotions people go through, which is not the primary aspect.
Similarly, option (4) covers the odds but not the thrills.

Option (2) does not speak about the thrills. While the author dies tell us that people can't comprehend the astronomical odds of winning the lottery, that is not the primary reason for buying lottery tickets. This is because the author explains why even someone who would understand the odds will buy the ticket.

Answer: (1) People buy lottery tickets because of the thrill even though the odds for winning are against them.

Example 5

The passage given below is followed by four alternate summaries. Choose the option that best captures the essence of the passage. [CAT 2017]

To me, a "classic" means precisely the opposite of what my predecessors understood: a work is classical by reason of its resistance to contemporaneity and supposed universality, by reason of its capacity to indicate human particularity and difference in that past epoch. The classic is not what tells me about shared humanity - or, more truthfully put, what lets me recognize myself as already present in the past, what nourishes in me the illusion that everything has been like me and has existed only to prepare the way for me. Instead, the classic is what gives access to radically different forms of human consciousness for any given generation of readers, and thereby expands for them the range of possibilities of what it means to be a human being.

(1) A classic is able to focus on the contemporary human condition and a unified experience of human consciousness.

(2) A classical work seeks to resist particularity and temporal difference even as it focuses on a common humanity.

(3) A classic is a work exploring the new, going beyond the universal, the contemporary, and the notion of a unified human consciousness.

(4) A classic is a work that provides access to a universal experience of the human race as opposed to radically different forms of human consciousness.

Solution

This is an abstract paragraph, where the author explains that his/her definition of a classic is the opposite of his/her predecessors. The author explains that most people feel that some works become classics because they always remain contemporary or relevant. However, the author feels that classics are valuable because they introduce us to people who are very different, thereby expanding the scope of humanness.

Let us review the options, keeping these points in mind.

Option (1) does not tell us the author's opinion – the author's predecessors believe that classics are contemporary and unified experience of human consciousness. That the author's opinion is the opposite can be understood from Instead, the classic is what gives access to radically different forms of human consciousness. Therefore, we can eliminate this option.

Option (2) also covers the author's predecessors' viewpoint of classics - resist temporal difference (temporal means related to time), focusses on a common humanity. Thus, we can eliminate this option.

Option (3) covers the author's opinion, as it speaks about a classic being new and not being universal, contemporary or unified. Therefore, this could be the correct option.

Option (4) covers the author's viewpoint (radically different forms of human consciousness) as well the predecessors' (universal experience of the human race). However, it is supporting the predecessors' viewpoint and not the author's. Therefore, it can be eliminated.

Thus, option (3) is the correct choice.

Answer: (3) A classic is a work exploring the new, going beyond the universal, the contemporary, and the notion of a unified human consciousness.