CAT 2020 VARC Analysis: What IIM Indore Actually Tested

CAT 2020 VARC Structure

Component	Details
Total VARC questions	26
RC passages	4 per slot
Questions per passage	4 or 5
Total RC questions	18
Verbal ability questions	8 (para jumbles, para summary, odd sentence out)
Time	40 minutes
Difficulty	Moderate to difficult

RC Passage Topics: Slot 1

Passage 1: Currency in the Tang Empire: Not a history lesson. A passage about how monetary systems shaped political authority and economic control in medieval China. The argument was about power and institutions, not historical facts.

Passage 2: Elephant Seal Migration: A science passage that used animal behaviour to argue about how scientists construct explanations and the assumptions embedded in those explanations. Classic IIM Indore: science as epistemology.

Passage 3: The Importance of Grammar: A passage on how grammatical conventions create shared meaning and coordinate social behaviour. The argument was philosophical, not linguistic.

Passage 4: Subsets of Anarchist Philosophy: A dense political philosophy passage tracing the history of the concept of anarchy and the different traditions within anarchist thought. Inference-heavy questions about the author's attitude toward different anarchist traditions.

RC Passage Topics: Slot 2

Visual Culture: A passage from art theory arguing about what images do to the people who see them: their role in building or transforming social worlds.

Biotechnology Regulation: A passage arguing that current frameworks for regulating biotechnology are inadequate and that scientists themselves should be more involved in shaping regulation.

RC Passage Topics: Slot 3

Human Nature (Hobbes vs Rousseau): A philosophical passage drawing on Rutger Bregman's book Humankind to argue against the Hobbesian view of human nature and in favour of a more optimistic reading influenced by Rousseau.

Key Patterns Across All Slots

Looking at all three slots together, IIM Indore's preferences emerge clearly. Every slot had at least one philosophy or political philosophy passage. Every slot had at least one science passage framed as an argument about knowledge, regulation or interpretation rather than as a factual account. Language and grammar appeared as a subject in Slot 1. History was used as a vehicle for contemporary arguments about power and institutions.

Questions across all slots were predominantly inference-based. Students reported that the options were close and that double negatives added difficulty. Very few questions could be answered by simply locating a fact in the passage.

What CAT 2020 Tells Us About CAT 2026

IIM Indore's question-setting philosophy is consistent across their three editions of CAT. The topics change but the approach does not. Expect dense argumentative passages, heavily inference-based questions, and wrong options designed to punish surface-level reading.

The preparation implication is direct: read argumentative non-fiction daily in the genres IIM Indore favours: philosophy, science policy, cultural theory, history with an argument. Practice identifying the author's actual position and tracing the logic of the argument rather than memorising the content.