IIT JEE & AIEEE Tips for Assertion-Reason Type questions in MCQs

17 Dec 2008

An often overlooked part of MCQ practice by students is the Assertion-Reason type questions. Considering that they fetch a cool +5 compared to +3 for normal objectives, getting them right becomes all the more important. This article deals with the strategy students can adopt to maximize their scoring potential in these questions. These type of questions test only the concepts of the students. A reasonably well-prepared student can answer these questions in a matter of a few seconds.

However, many students get these questions wrong due to avoidable reasons. A well defined strategy must be chalked out to attempt these questions.

The First thing you need to do is to see both statements and check if one of them is incorrect. If you are able to find an incorrect statement, then you have automatically cracked the problem.[Only one statement may be wrong in these questions]. Also research has show that proving something wrong is much much easier then proving something right. For Maths, you can randomly substitute a value to check the correctness of the equation.

Let us say a statement says:

In a cyclic quadrilateral, A,B,C,D are the angles, then Sin A + Sin B + Sin C + Sin D =0 [Question taken from a recent FITJEE Test Series Paper]

You can imagine a square which can fit into the definition of a cyclic quadrilateral such that each of these angles is 90 degrees and the corresponding value of the equation is 4.

Thus you do not even have to prove something, you merely have to disprove something. If you find that both statements are correct , then you have eliminated two options. [Please note that if the substituted values did satisfy the equation, it doesn’t necessarily mean that the equation is correct i.e. You can use this strategy only to prove something wrong!]

Now you must determine whether one statement is implying the other one. This is where your subtle concepts come into picture. After finding out this, you can now indeed be happy because you have successfully cracked a problem!

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