Cloze testing was a part of Reading Comprehension in the 1950s. Cloze test is primarily asked in SSC and banking exams under the Verbal Ability section. It is in the form of fill in the blanks and generally has 10-15 FIB questions. These are all vocabulary based. Context of the word being used is important too. You need not know the meaning of all the words given in the options. Let’s read further and devise technique to solve Cloze Test based questions.
What Cloze test is all about in Bank PO/Clerk & SSC exams?
This question type is like fill in the blanks with antonyms and synonyms; the difference being that in this case one must eliminate the choices that cannot be used to fill in the blanks to complete the sentences. Only thing that is to be done is to read the word and try to make the paragraph comprehensible. The graph below gives you an idea of the kind of questions that are asked in the Verbal Ability section of Banking & SSC exam.
Data: Score & Question Type
VA & RC, QA, GK are all important. Out of lakhs, more than a million candidates who appear for SBI PO or associate bank exams, those who manage to have a good score in each of the sections are only in thousands.
Significant Points about Cloze Test in Bank PO/Clerk & SSC exams
- Only about 1% of the candidates can score above the cut-offs.
- The kind of vocabulary one needs to have for these questions is not required to have more than the 3000-4000 words that institutes like Career Launcher make available.
- These questions can be solved in quick time and do not require in-depth grammatical knowledge either. An understanding of context is enough.
- These questions may be seen as simple fill in the blanks sort of stuff but the real reason these are used can be judged from the above where the test can be seen as a measure of cognitive ability of the candidate depending on the complexity of the passage having been taken. Hope you know the steps to solve Cloze Test.
- For each of the blanks, one gets 1 or 0.5 marks depending on the difficulty level.
- Even in CAT, vocabulary based questions are asked. The difficulty level is also such that these carry 2 marks as all other questions in VA carry.
- One Cloze Test question in Banking or SSC exam carries 5-10 marks. The number of such sets can be more than one.
How to solve?
- Meaning & context
This has already been mentioned in the post. It is important to have a good vocabulary. This is not the only thing that is required though. In case of CAT, for the kind of questions that are given, four to five meanings and the usage of the word for the given meanings is listed. One or two of those may be such that you may not know despite using the word in written communication and conversational language that you use. You need to find the right option by eliminating the options that you are aware of.
Winding up
These are simple questions where knowledge of words is as important as the context. Reading Comprehension questions require you to make use of the skill that you have acquired over the years. Already a piece has been written about ‘Read wisely or widely’ in one of the related posts in the Banking & SSC section. Take a free Cloze Test now!
