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Practice by source · The Economist

The Economist reading comprehension practice for CAT and GMAT

If a mentor told you to read The Economist to improve your RC, they were half right. Its dense, argument-forward, data-aware editorial style is almost a template for the economics and business passages CAT and GMAT set — a claim stated early, evidence marshalled, objections weighed, a conclusion earned rather than asserted. But reading it passively does little for your score. The gain comes from testing yourself on that prose. Paste any such article into PracticeRC and turn a five-minute read into a scored, explained RC drill.

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Why The Economist's style mirrors CAT and GMAT passages

The short answer: both prize compression and argument over narrative. An Economist leader rarely wanders. It opens by naming the question, commits to a position, and then spends its length defending that position against the strongest counter-cases — hedging where the evidence is thin, hardening where it is firm. That is precisely the anatomy the exams reward you for tracking: knowing what the author claims, how strongly, on what basis, and where the argument concedes ground. Read one leader closely and you have read a scale model of a CAT VARC passage.

The register is also data-aware without being a data dump. You meet ratios, growth rates, cross-country comparisons, and the occasional counter-intuitive figure, always in service of an argument rather than for their own sake. This is exactly how GMAT academic passages and CAT's economics and business passages use numbers: not to test arithmetic, but to test whether you can read a figure as carefully as a sentence. A falling growth rate is not a falling quantity; a bigger share of a shrinking market can still be a smaller sum. The Economist trains that reflex on nearly every page.

One more thing carries over: tone. The magazine's voice is confident, occasionally wry, and never neutral. Learning to separate what it reports from what it endorses — a distinction it deliberately blurs with irony — is the same skill tested by tone-and-attitude and author-stance questions on both exams.

What to read, and how to pick a piece

Not every article makes a good drill. The best RC material argues something and can be understood without prior reporting. Favour these:

Skip pieces that are mostly breaking-news updates or lists — they lack the sustained argument the exams test. If a paragraph could be summarised as "and then this happened," it is reporting, not reasoning, and it will not stretch you.

Try a sample in The Economist's style

The passage below is original, written to match the magazine's compact, argument-forward register. Read it under a timer, choose your answer, then check the explanation. This one is CAT-style with four options.

Sample passage

Governments enamoured of industrial policy like to point at the semiconductor boom as proof that subsidies work. The causal story is tidier than the record. Where state money has flowed into chipmaking, capacity has indeed risen — but so has it in places that spent little, drawn by the same surge in global demand. Disentangling the subsidy's effect from the tide it rode is harder than the triumphal speeches allow. None of this proves that industrial policy is futile; targeted support can plausibly shorten the odds on a risky bet. It does suggest that treating every expansion in a favoured sector as a subsidy's dividend flatters the policymaker and teaches the wrong lesson to the next one, who may lavish public money where private capital would have arrived unbidden.

1. The author's primary purpose is to

  1. demonstrate that industrial subsidies never influence the growth of a targeted sector.
  2. caution against crediting industrial policy with growth that broader demand may have produced anyway.
  3. recommend that governments expand subsidies to the semiconductor industry.
  4. argue that private capital is always more efficient than public investment.

Answer: B — The author warns against reading every expansion as a subsidy's payoff. (A) overstates the case, which the passage explicitly rejects with "None of this proves that industrial policy is futile"; (C) reverses the cautionary stance; (D) is a sweeping claim the passage never makes — it says private capital "would have arrived" in one scenario, not that it is always superior.

Generate your own RC test from an article

How to practise on The Economist

  1. Choose one leader or briefing that argues a position — a piece on trade, monetary policy, or a business shift works well.
  2. Paste the text or URL into PracticeRC, choose CAT (four options) or GMAT (five options), and generate the set.
  3. Solve against a timer: about 8–10 minutes per CAT-length passage, 6–8 for a shorter GMAT one.
  4. On every miss, name the trap — overstated stance, reversed causation, a reported view mistaken for the author's — before moving on.
  5. Because the app generates a fresh test each time, re-run the same article after a week and see whether your reading, not your memory, has improved.

This is the core advantage over a fixed question bank: you will never exhaust the supply or start memorising answers. Every article on the site becomes practice. For a broader shortlist of publications, see the best sources to practise RC, and for a slower, more literary register try Aeon essay RC practice.

Turn reading into a measurable habit

The reason "just read The Economist" so often fails is that reading has no scoreboard. You finish a piece, feel informed, and have no idea whether you actually understood its argument or only skimmed its surface. A test closes that gap. When you have to choose between two plausible options and then read why one was a trap, you find out exactly where your reading was loose — and that is where improvement comes from.

Build it into a routine: one article, one generated test, one honest review, most days. See the daily RC practice routine for a workable schedule, and the CAT VARC preparation guide for how RC fits the wider section.

Frequently asked questions

Does reading The Economist actually improve reading comprehension for CAT and GMAT?

Reading it builds familiarity with dense, argument-forward prose, but reading alone does not improve exam RC. You improve by testing yourself under a timer, choosing between close options, and reviewing why each wrong option was wrong. Paste an article into PracticeRC to convert passive reading into a scored drill.

Which sections of The Economist are best for RC practice?

Leaders and the longer briefings are ideal: they state a position, marshal evidence, and weigh objections in a few hundred words, exactly the structure CAT and GMAT passages use. Finance, Business, and Science sections give you the data-aware register both exams favour.

The Economist writing feels too hard. Is that a problem?

No, that is the point. CAT and GMAT passages are deliberately hard, and practising on prose one notch above your comfort level is what builds durable reading stamina. Start with one shorter piece, drill it under a timer, and increase length as your accuracy holds up.

How do I turn an Economist article into a timed RC test?

Copy the article text or its URL, paste it into PracticeRC, choose CAT (four options) or GMAT (five options), and generate. You get a fresh passage-based test with instant scoring and a per-option explanation, so every read ends with feedback rather than a vague sense of having understood it.

Turn your next read into a scored test

Paste any Economist-style article and get a CAT or GMAT Reading Comprehension test with per-option explanations — free and unlimited.

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