Data Interpretation - Tricks and Techniques

Data interpretation is the most scoring and time-consuming section in IBPS and other competitive examinations. In quantitative aptitude section, you can see at least 2 data interpretation sets each having 5 questions. In PO level there are 40-50 questions in Quantitative aptitude section and the sectional cutoff remains 18-19. So if you solve those two sets corrected you need to solve 10 questions out of remaining 40 questions. Here are three important techniques to make Data Interpretation calculations fast

Visual Estimation

It is a well-known fact that it is near to impossible to solve 200 questions in 120 minutes accurately. The term "Accurately" is important here because I have seen many candidates attempting 190+ questions and fails to qualify. The reason behind the failure is low accuracy and many times accuracy level falls below 40%. An important point to be noted down here is by attempting 190+ with low accuracy you get less time for questions you are sure about and there is negative marking in most of the competitive exams.

Now lets come to our topic. How to use visual estimation technique to solve Data Interpretation questions. Let's take a visual example:-

Example - Red bars states wheat production state and Green bars states rice production.

Question - In which year percentage increase Wheat production was highest?

As you can see there is an increase of 5 tonnes in production both wheat and rice production every year.

10% of 50 = 5

10% of 70 = 7

So the answer should 2006.

Finding averages

Many times in Data Interpretation, questions are asked to find the average of 5-6 big numbers. As all these numbers are from the same graph, there is a high probability that these number will be close to each other. Take a look to following visual example:-

In the above example, you can find average of above number in just 5 seconds:-

7800 ( 14 +29 + 108 + 22 + 120/5 ) = 7800 + 58.6 = 7858.6

I always try to find answers by approximation, in my mind, I calculated answer 7860. Try it yourself.

Solve the fractions quickly

Learn the value of fractions in percentages. Please read Time and work chapter in my previous post in which I explained via a table.

Faster calculations

The only thing that you require to score well in data interpretation questions is the calculation speed. Try to find tricks and shortcuts. You can find multiplication tricks from my previous post.

Let's take an example :- How much 468 of 21428 ?

Let me make this simple for you.

1% of 21428 = 214
2% of 21428 = 428
0.1% of 21428 = 21

For me, answer should be around 2.2%

There are tonnes of such techniques which makes calculations easy. No teacher is going to teach techniques in the class. You need to learn them with practice.

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