Working With Arun Sharma's CAT VARC Materials
I've spent more years than I care to count watching students bounce between different prep resources for the Verbal section. Arun Sharma's books have been the default recommendation for a while now, and they still hold up in most cases. The PDF versions floating around online range from useful to completely unofficial, so here's what you actually need to know before you start downloading. The official publisher is Pearson. Anything labeled as a PDF from a random website is either a scanned copy of the physical book or a bootleg file someone uploaded. The quality varies massively. I've seen pixelated pages where the comprehension passages are unreadable after a certain zoom level, and I've seen perfectly clean scans that skip entire chapters because the original page was folded or damaged in the source copy. My recommendation is to buy the physical book if you can. The PDF experience with these books has real limitations. The comprehension passages in particular are designed to be read on paper, and cramming your eyes into a 10-inch screen for 40-minute reading sessions does not end well. That said, if cost or access is a real barrier, the PDFs do circulate widely enough that you can find decent ones. Look for uploads from 2023 or later, since the newer editions have updated question patterns that match the current CAT format.
The key difference between editions matters more than most people admit. The 2021 edition and earlier books organize VARC differently from what you'll see on the actual exam. The newer versions added a heavier emphasis on inference-based questions and shifted some of the verbal reasoning weight. If you're grinding questions from an old edition, you'll be practicing a slightly distorted version of what's ahead of you.
How the Books Actually Work in Practice
The VARC section of CAT has two distinct parts: Reading Comprehension and Verbal Ability. Arun Sharma splits these into separate chapters or even separate books depending on the edition. The RC portion alone runs over 100 pages of dense passages covering philosophy, science, literature, and business ethics. The verbal ability side handles para-jumbles, odd-one-out, and sentence correction. Here's the thing most people skip: the book doesn't teach you how to read faster. It teaches you how to answer questions after you've read something. The difference is important. Students routinely waste weeks trying to increase their reading speed using these exercises. What actually moves the needle is your ability to extract the core argument from a passage under time pressure, and that skill comes from deliberate practice, not speed drills. I keep running into the same problem with students who treat every passage like it requires equal attention. A 400-word passage on abstract philosophy and a 300-word passage on a business case study do not deserve the same reading time. The book's suggested approach assigns roughly equal weight to practice sets, which is unrealistic for the actual exam where some passages are straightforward and others are deliberately confusing. My workaround is to time myself by passage type instead of by set. Hard philosophy passages get 5 minutes maximum. If I'm not down by then, I mark my best guess and move on. That habit is harder to build than people realize because the book makes every question feel equally important.
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What the Material Gets Wrong
The verbal ability chapter on sentence correction is the weakest part of the VARC book. It relies heavily on grammatical rules that barely appear on the modern CAT. The exam rarely tests comma splices or subject-verb agreement in isolation. You'll spend hours drilling error identification techniques that have minimal relevance to the actual question patterns. Skip that section or give it two days at most. Don't let it eat a week of your schedule. Another issue is the difficulty calibration. Some practice sets are genuinely harder than anything CAT has produced in recent years. Students who train exclusively on the toughest sets from this book sometimes panic when they see the actual exam, not because it's harder, but because it feels easier and they second-guess themselves. That's a real psychological effect. I've watched capable students lose accuracy on passages they should have nailed because their brain was calibrated for punishment-level difficulty.
What to Pair It With
No single book covers this well enough on its own. The official NTA mock tests matter more than any practice set in Arun Sharma's material because they reflect the actual interface and question distribution. The Coaching Factory's verbal sets are also closer to current CAT patterns than most commercially available books. Use the Sharma book as your foundational practice material, not as your only source. If you're working with a PDF, check the OCR quality on comprehension passages before you commit to a study plan. A bad scan where "their" reads as "there" or words are split across lines incorrectly will waste your time and potentially confuse your parsing habits. I learned that the hard way when a student once spent three days re-reading a passage that was illegible due to a scanning error, convinced she was misunderstanding the author's intent. It was a font issue, not a comprehension issue. Worth noting before you invest real study hours into any downloaded file.
