CAT 2025 Lesson : Summary - Types of Paragraphs

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.