Getting Started With Arun Sharma's Quantitative Aptitude
I picked up the 11th edition last year after going through at least six other prep books for competitive exams. The one thing most people overlook about this text is that it isn't structured the way most coaching institutes teach anymore. It assumes you already know what you're doing and gives you practice problems to grind through. That approach works if you're self-studying, but it falls apart completely if you're trying to learn a topic for the first time from scratch. The book covers approximately 37 chapters across categories like Number Systems, Algebra, Geometry, Mensuration, Time and Work, Percentages, Profit and Loss, Speed Time Distance, and modern math topics like Permutations Combinations Probability. Each chapter follows the same pattern: concept summaries, solved examples, and then a massive set of practice questions divided by difficulty level. The difficulty scaling is fair, though the jump between Level 1 and Level 2 exercises can feel arbitrary sometimes.
Quantitative Aptitude By Arun Sharma 11th Edition Pdf
People search for the PDF version constantly because the physical book costs around 550 to 650 rupees and some candidates don't want to carry it around during their prep phase. The 11th edition added updated exam patterns reflecting recent shifts in CAT and XAT question styles, more DI sets with unusual data presentations, and questions pulled from recent years' papers. The PDF circulates widely on various educational sites and Telegram channels. You can usually find it within a day of searching. I used a library portal through my college to access a digital copy before buying the physical one, which turned out to be the right call since I ended up annotating heavily anyway. Here's a specific problem I ran into that nobody seems to mention in reviews. In the Permutations and Combinations section, there's a problem about arranging letters of the word "MATHEMATICS" where two vowels must always be together. The book gives the answer as something like 4,989,600 but the working shown doesn't account for repeated vowels being identical in certain arrangements. I spent about 40 minutes debugging why my manual calculation kept coming out lower than the published answer. The workaround was to manually list out the vowel cases instead of treating them as distinct items, which the solution glosses over. This kind of gap between the stated answer and the shown method happens maybe two or three times per chapter across the whole book. It's minor but annoying when you're practicing under timed conditions and your answer doesn't match. The real strength of this book is the volume of practice material. Most students prepare for exams that give you 20 to 24 quantitative questions in 40 minutes. That means you need speed, not just accuracy. Arun Sharma's questions are designed to force you through that transition. The early exercises teach the concept, the middle ones build speed, and the advanced set actually mirrors what you'll see in the exam. I'd estimate that working through one full chapter with the difficulty progression takes about 3 to 4 hours if you're serious about it. Some students skip ahead to the hard problems immediately, which is a mistake. The book is structured so that the intermediate problems teach shortcuts the advanced ones rely on. Skipping that middle ground means you'll be deriving formulas during the exam instead of recalling them.
One counter-intuitive thing about this book: the chapter on Number Systems is probably the least useful section for most exam takers. It goes very deep into divisibility rules, remainders, and HCF LCM properties that rarely appear in the actual CAT or GMAT format anymore. The exam boards shifted toward applied arithmetic questions years ago. If you're short on time, spend 20 minutes skimming that chapter instead of grinding through all the problems. The Geometry chapter is similarly overloaded with cases that won't show up. Focus on the core theorems and move on. Another nuance people miss: the book doesn't teach you to recognize which shortcut applies to which problem type. It gives you the shortcut, then gives you problems. It doesn't train the pattern-recognition skill that actually saves time in the exam. You need to supplement this with something that explicitly maps problem patterns to solution methods. I used a coaching module for that part and relied on this book purely for practice volume. Doing both together cut my average quantitative section time by about 35 percent over six weeks. The main limitation of this book is that it's entirely India-focused in its exam context. If you're preparing for GMAT or GRE, the difficulty curve is off. The GMAT quantitative section rewards conceptual elegance over brute-force calculation, and Arun Sharma's approach leans toward mechanical speed. The questions are also harder than what you'll actually encounter on those tests. For GMAT prep, I'd recommend offloading to a different resource and using this book only if you want extra challenge practice. For CAT, XAT, NMAT, and other Indian management entrance exams, it's still the standard reference for a reason.
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There's also the issue of the solution appendix. The answers are given at the back of the book, but the detailed working for even-numbered questions is sparse. Some steps are just stated without explanation, which works fine if you already understand the concept but becomes frustrating when you're stuck. The online forums have worked solutions for the tougher problems, but verifying which ones are correct requires cross-referencing multiple sources. I found a Telegram channel run by a former faculty member who posted typed solutions for every problem in the 11th edition. That's worth looking for if you're using the PDF version, since you won't have the physical book to flip back and forth. The PDF itself has some quality issues depending on where you get it. Scanned copies often have OCR errors in the math notation, especially in the algebra and geometry sections where symbols like sigma, pi, and fraction bars get garbled. This makes reading certain problems nearly impossible without switching to the printed version or a clean scan. The diagrams in the mensuration and geometry chapters are also frequently low resolution in pirated PDFs. If you're serious about this book, get a clean source or just buy the physical copy. The difference in usability is significant enough to matter during an intensive prep period. My practical recommendation is to treat this as a question bank first and a learning tool second. Go through the concept summaries quickly, do the Level 1 and 2 problems thoroughly, then use Level 3 as your actual mock practice. Don't read the solutions immediately after getting a problem wrong. Sit with it for at least ten minutes before checking. That's where the real learning happens, and the book's structure supports that approach if you let it.
