CAT gyaan - only for the solicited!

Quite some inquiries are pouring into my inbox from TIME students, old friends, relatives etc who are aspiring for CAT. So I thought instead of answering the same kind of question "What's your general guidance to crack CAT?" n number of times individually for each person. I thought I'd pen it once here and keep circulating this link. Enough intro. Now let's get down to some business.

[to help put things in perspective I'm repeating that this is posted on August 14th, 2007]
If it's CAT 2007 that you are aiming dude then time is precious to you, every minute of it. Ideally, if you are working too, you should have joined the weekend batch of some coaching institute. I joined in TIME-Hyderabad and if you are in Hyderabad, I'd recommend the same.

CAT is ALL ABOUT PRACTICE! Questions per se are not challenging, given time 10th student would crack the paper, you might have known this. What makes it particularly tough is the time pressure. On an average getting less than a minute for a question is troubling. Add to that the questions generally would have a small twist somewhere. Noting that down while you glance through question is important (I'm talking abt Quant and DI type questions)
My major list of advices
For Quant
(i) practice a whole lot of problems, whenever you could make time. Preferably a mix of all varieties, make sure which are your comfortable areas.
(ii) Brush your basic math very well, starting from reciprocals, two by two multiplications, and squares upto 25 ( you never know when they would come handy)

For DI,
(i) Initially questions will be far far tough to finish in the given time, but by practicing lot of solved models and refining your way of solving them continuously you will slowly begin to master them. Make mistakes first few times, but look at the solutions and refine your THOUGHT PROCESS that led to that mistake.
(ii) Develop intuition rather than insisting on calculating till last decimal point (some questions are nasty that u have to calculate till last decimal, but it wud be wise to skip them) in tackling the graphs based problems

For English
(i) Read everything and anything that you think could be obtained. Become familiar with all sorts of topics dry, sarcastic, hinting, sobre, hilarious, ironical passages etc. Target 250-300words per minute reading speed. If you aim stars, you can reach moon at least!
(ii) Vocabulary must be jacked up like anything. To say the least, all GRE words.
(iii) Concentrate especially on phrasal verbs. Either they make or break your chances. Beware!


GOLDEN MANTRAS
(i) Never miss a MOCK-CAT. [MOCK-CAT means the timed test taken along with other students at a proper venue, followed by verification with answer key, followed by analyzing the wrong answers and developing insights on the mistaken and unattempted ones]
(ii) CAT is not challenging any one particular question. It's about maximizing your score at the end of the day. So SKIPPING the uneasy ones and CASHING on the easy ones is the key.