SBI Clerk Mains 2022 Exam: Best Strategy to Solve Reading Comprehension

Do you or your friends find the Reading Comprehension (RC) part of English a hard nut to crack in SBI Clerk Exam? And do you feel that even after good preparation, it is hard to score full marks in the English section? If your answer is yes, this article is aimed at helping you or your friend. English reading comprehension plays an important part in maximizing the score in English Section of SBI Clerk Exam. Candidates have to face around 10-15 questions based on RC. To get command over it, you need to ace your reading speed. The aspirant should be ready to comprehend a comprehension coming from various fields like literature, politics, history, economics, science, and other important subjects.  

If you’re through with the SBI Clerk prelims exam, you must be thinking about boosting your mains preparation as the exam is expected to be conducted in December 2022/January 2023. You need to understand that the coming exam will be assessing the level of proficiency and ability to answer with speed. RCs or Reading comprehensions are perhaps the most scoring and important part of the SBI Clerk Exam. It also consists of the maximum number of questions in any Banking Exam.

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SBI Clerk Exam Pattern 2022 Mains: Phase II

The structure of the main examination (online objective type) would be as follows:

Note: The total time-duration to attempt the SBI Clerk Mains 2022 exam is 2 hours 40 minutes.

Best Strategies for scoring better in the Reading Comprehension section

This section simply checks or tests your ability to read the given text, process it, and clearly understand its meaning. This section is going to test your knowledge of:

• Vocabulary
• Text-Comprehension

Obviously, both these elements can help in getting a clear or better understanding of the given passage. To put it simply, to understand a text, you must have sufficient knowledge of Vocabulary. The questions in the RCs as seen by the previous year’s questions are inference-based. That is to say, these questions are not direct questions, but you’ll have to infer from the given passage. Plus, you’ll be coming across one or more conclusions given in the question to choose one. Depending on what is being asked in the question you’ll have to answer, only one will be true and the other false.

Now let’s move towards the Approach that you should follow while attempting Reading Comprehension in the SBI Clerk Exam 2021.

How to Improve Your Reading Comprehension Skills?

Sometimes candidates feel overwhelmed when they sit in an exam and fail at reading comprehension, whereas, reading comprehension can be easy and utmost entertaining.  PracticeMock Blog is giving you some important and timely pieces of advice to apply in your reading style, and habits to accelerate your regular RC practice. It is surely going to develop your reading skills and improve your reading comprehension. Plus, reading will no more be a burden you have borne in the exam, but a much more fun experience than you think!

How to prepare yourself at home to comprehend Reading Material in SBI Clerk 2022 Exam?

1. Remove disturbances from your environment

First and foremost, read in a room or a place where you can better concentrate. You need to eliminate any distractions from your environment and turn off the TV, smartphone, etc. to stop other new disturbances from appearing. Turn your phone off or turn it on silent and keep it somewhere where notifications won’t disturb you while you are reading. If it’s someone else who is responsible for such distractions, quickly relocate. Move to a peaceful and quiet spot. For better concentration, you can also try listening to music if you still feel distracted.

Always keep in mind-‘I can do it!’ And start with full of energy and motivation. Your distraction should be your fuel to your fire.

3. Re-read the text to improve your Comprehension Power

Sometimes it even happens with the intellectuals of first-rate, that after finishing a paragraph or page they don’t remember any of what they just read. Therefore, this is absolutely normal and is no sign of memory inferiority.  When this happens to you never hesitate, go back and re-read the given text. This will refresh your memory and improve your comprehension power.  You just need to read the text again, the second time, a bit more slowly. This will make sure you understood what came earlier.

Because if you forget it, you’ll waste more time by going back again while answering the questions or choosing the correct option in the exam.

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4. Improve your vocabulary to get better at understanding what you read

Vocabulary plays a vital role in answering reading comprehension questions. If you don’t know the meaning of a certain word says, you’ll surely get a hard time answering questions.

Vocabulary is like the spirit or soul of the passage. Just like a word is nothing without its meaning. Hence, to improve your reading comprehension you need to have a sufficient amount of vocabulary in your mind.

5. Vocabulary Building Made Easy

Download a good dictionary application on your smartphone while reading. There are hordes of dictionaries both online and offline to be downloaded from Play Store. When you come across a word you don’t know, find the definition and write it down in a copy.

Read as many books as you can, but with attention and concentration. If you have a good vocabulary/word power you can guess the definition of a word you don’t know by the context of the paragraph of a story. By reading regularly you’ll be exposed to a wide range of vocabulary.

Daily reading of the newspaper, magazine, or a comic book and picking up new words from it and noting it down in your diary or rough book and then using it in your daily conversations or at least reading it and revising it aloud is going to greatly help you to build your vocabulary. It will increase your contextual vocabulary.

If you think you’re below an SBI Clerk Exam 2022 cracker’s level, start with articles and books that you can fully understand. Then, work on your quick improvement. Those who are at a vocabulary level lower than needed for the exam and want to improve should consider reading books above their level to come across new and more advanced vocabulary.

Simple & Effective Tricks to Build Vocabulary for Reading Comprehension

Vocabulary building can be fun if you apply good learning tricks to it. Here are some of those tricks you can implement in your learning process to get fantastic results.

1. Easily Building Vocabulary Via Prefixes & Suffixes

Trick 1-Know about Prefixes, Suffixes (Pratyaya in Hindi), and Roots. Prefixes fix before a word and Suffixes after it. For example, let us take a look at some Prefixes & Suffixes:

I. Annu/Inni is a Prefix

Annu + al (means happening once every year)

(Annu/Inni means Year, as in Annual, Biennial, and Triennial)

Some more Prefixes are:

• Auto-
• Bi-
• Bio-
• Cardio-

II. Able is a Suffix

• Accept + able = Acceptable
• Imagine + able = Imaginable

Similarly, there are hundreds of words that have able in it. Some are comparable, tolerable, washable, readable, eatable, avoidable, etc.

Some more Suffixes are:

• -Ache (means to suffer pain)
• -An (means belonging to, as in Indian)

Some more Suffixes

-Bound (as in eastbound, westbound, southbound, & outbound)

-Cide (as in fratricide, homicide, genocide, bactericide, pesticide, regicide, suicide, insecticide, germicide)

Pay heed to these Prefixes and Suffixes:

• De-as in decentralize
• Co-as in co-author
• Deci-as in decigram
• EE- as in detainee from detain
• -Er/Or as in oversee from overseer
• Hyper- as in hyper-critical
• Intra- as in intra-party
• -Itis as in appendicitis
• Seism- as in seismic (of an earthquake)

Trick 2-For a quick word building you need to understand how adjective changes to a verb, a noun changes to a verb, a verb changes to an adjective, and an adjective can change its form from adjective to adverb.

Adjective to verb

The word Central changes to centralize and intense to intensify

Noun to verb

The word Length changes to lengthen and scrutiny to scrutinize

Verb to Adjective

The word obtain becomes obtainable and detach becomes detachable.

Adjective to Adverb

The word accurate becomes accurately, ceaseless becomes ceaselessly, and remote becomes remotely just by adding Ly at the end of the word.

Note: You can find such tables online, and in case you want us to write a well-researched separate article dealing with the conversion of words here on PracticeMock Blog, do let us know in the comment section.

2. Read Articles & Books Twice & Thrice to Gain Fluency

Now it is crystal clear that you need to be a speed-reader to read and understand the text naturally and fluently. For this, you should read any text twice or even as many times as you like until your thinking and grasping power increase. Expose your mind to various words and phrases.

3. Practice Taking Notes to Boost Reading Comprehension

Keep a rough copy near you to write notes in. Taking notes, while not immediately exciting, is a good way to boost reading comprehension. If your reading comprehension is already decent, you may only need to take occasional notes. Your notes should be made in such a way that you can follow what is being said chronologically in the text at a given point. This will definitely help in the exam.

4. Enjoy Reading & Beat SBI Clerk 2022 Exam 

Last but not least, Reading Comprehension is not as difficult as some candidates think! In fact, it can be and becomes very interesting for those who become keen readers, or for those who enjoy reading. Hence, build a habit of reading whatever you see under the sun and say to yourself that you’re very interested in reading. Start reading a newspaper daily without breaking this routine.

We recommend starting your SBI Clerk Prep Journey with either The Indian Express, The Hindu to develop the art of reading the newspaper. Then after some days, start read one of them with Times of India or any other newspaper like The Economics Times. They all have a good layout, to start with.

A newspaper is a cheap and best source of knowledge and a rendezvous where you can find news related to any subject on earth, be it sports, movies, crime, technology, business, and more. Slowly or maybe quickly, depending upon the efforts you’ll put in, you’ll develop an interest in reading quickly/speed-reading.

Eventually, in a few days or so, you’ll be interested in what’s happening around you and start to critically read and analyze news articles and editorials. It is guaranteed, if you do this regularly, your comprehension powers will gradually increase and you will hardly face any difficulty in the RC section of the SBI Clerk Exam 2022.

5. Check Your Strengths and Weaknesses via our Mock Tests

Apart from this, you have to keep practicing from various websites and attempt quizzes that have additional benefits for you.

Go for SBI Clerk Mains Mock tests and boost your preparation by applying your knowledge and the above-mentioned tips on them!

7 Books for Polishing Your Reading Comprehension Skill

There are hoards of books available in the market dedicated to Reading Comprehension. Here are some names that stand out.

1. Word Power Made Easy by Normal Lewis
2. English Grammar & Composition by Wren and Martin
3. Descriptive General English by S P Bakshi and Richa Sharma
4. Objective English for Competitive Examinations by Hari Mohan Prasad, Uma Rani Sinha, Mcgraw Hill Education Publication
5. 7 Keys to Comprehension by Susan Zimmermann
6. Comprehension Connections: Bridges to Strategic Reading by Tanny
7. The Art of Teaching Reading by Lucy Calkins is a long read

Conclusion

If your pocket allows, buy one of them, and go through them. If you don’t want to spend money on expensive books, these free reading comprehension Archives at PracticeMock Blog are going to be enough for getting out the best in you. By regularly reading our articles and taking mock tests without fail, you’ll get immensely confident.

After all, competitive exams are all about knowledge and confidence. That’s the reason why most toppers don’t make it through, but most average students do wonders in it. If you have any confusion or question related to SBI Clerk Exam 2022 exam, let us see in the comments section below. We’ll be happy to clear all your doubts and help you out in the best possible way!

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