Tones of the Passages in Reading Comprehension for CAT Exam

How to identify author’s tone or tone of the RC passage?

Look for the author’s participation

Authors write things for a variety of reasons. They may just write to report, simply putting down what they take to be the facts, giving no indication of their own feelings, either positive or negative, about those facts. Or they may set down what someone else has reported as fact, without giving any indication of how that person feels about them or how they themselves feel about them.

But often authors write with other purposes in mind. For example, they may write to persuade the reader of the merits of some position, in which case they typically write in such a way that the reader can tell that they have positive feelings with respect to that position.

By contrast, they may write to warn the reader that a view has no merit, in which case they often make evaluative comments that allow the reader to infer what their attitude toward the matter is. Thus, one feature of a text that careful readers pay attention to is whether the author, by taking a certain tone, or by certain word choices, reveals any attitude other than bland neutrality toward the material he or she is presenting.

Also of interest is whether any of the people mentioned by the author in the passage are presented as having any particular attitude toward anything that figures in the passage. These things are potentially important in evaluating what has been read. For example, if an author’s attitude is one of boundless enthusiasm, a careful reader might take what that author says with a grain of salt.

Where to find the author’s tone?

In the CAT Reading Comprehension section, you will encounter questions that ask directly about the author’s attitude or the author’s tone, or the attitude of people that the author discusses. Another kind of question may ask you to consider words or phrases that appear in the passage and to identify those that indicate the attitude of the author, or of people mentioned in the passage, toward some specific thing that is discussed in the passage.

When you are dealing with a question that asks directly about attitude, you should assess the passage with an eye to whether it contains indicators of tone. For example, sometimes an initially positive tone is tempered later by an expression of doubts; or an initially rather dismissive tone might be moderated later by a grudging admission of something worthwhile.

The description of the author’s attitude overall will reflect this and you should choose among the answer choices accordingly. An example will illustrate this point.

Tone of RC passage example:

The lines above have abundant evidence of the author’s attitude toward the book “The Strange Career of Jim Crow”. Based on this evidence, we can shortlist option A, which suggests a positive attitude.

Thus we see that questions on the tone of the passage or the author can be answered by finding evidence or reference in the passage that suggests or gives an explicit hint at the right answer.

List of Tones for RC Passages

Some of the most common types of RC tones that I have come across are listed in the table below:

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• 7 Easy Tips for CAT [RC] Reading Comprehension
• CAT RC : Macro and Micro Approach
• Types of Reading Comprehension Questions
• How to identify Tones of the RC Passages
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• How to solve inference based RC questions
• Types of Reading Comprehension Passages
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