General aptitude in GATE comprises of two parts :
a) English grammar and Vocabulary :
This carries 5 marks as per the previous years' trend..Questions are generally asked from these domains :
i) Sentence completion / correction. : Here some sentence will be given and in that some phrase needs to be corrected or the blank should be filled with an appropriate phrase..So for this clear grasp on grammar like tense , preposition , subject - verb agreement etc . is a pre requisite..
ii) Verbal analogy : A pair of words will be given between there will be some relation..Besides this one more word will be given as a question..So we have to choose appropriate word which expresses the same relation as mentioned in the given pair in the question..Sometimes there will be 4 options and we have to pick the odd one out..
iii) Antonyms / Synonyms / Phrase Meaning : In this some word/phrase will be given and then its meaning or opposite meaning will be asked..For this good hold on vocabulary should be there..
iv) Inference based questions : In such a questions , a course of action or a small passage will be given.In the given options , we have to choose that one which is logically inferrable from the given course of action or the passage..For this one needs good comprehension and inference making skills..Although the inference is a subjective issue as sometimes it may vary from person to person..Still options are given in a manner which are not ambiguous generally.
Now coming to second part which is :
b) Qualitative And Quantitative reasoning :
This carries 10 marks and encompasses a large domain. So it has no hard and fast syllabus as such..But in the past few years it has been observed that this section focusses on logical reasoning questions and not on the calculation ones for the CS branch especially.So some of the main topics that should be covered are :
a) Set theory questions(especially Venn diagram based)
b) Counting based(Permutation and Combination)
c) Simple geometrical questions(Till class 10th standard)
d) Questions based on percentages,profit and loss etc(Though became less frequent in last few years as mentioned just before)
e) Data interpretation questions : Some diagram like pie chart , or bar graph , histogram or table of data etc will be given and some question will be asked like highest sale of phone in a particular year etc..Normally these questions are calculative but easy hence calculation should be done properly..
f) Data sufficiency questions : Some piece of data will be given and some query will be asked based on it and then it will be asked whether the queried piece of information can be found using the given data.
g) Miscellaneous questions : There may be other sorts of questions like cube configuration , direction finding , finding position of an specific person given the constraints in the question , blood - relation based problems etc..
As far as the time needed is concerned , I think one has good reasoning capacity and decency in English , then not much time is required to be given.
But still if one is not that much confident in this section , one may give 1-1.5 hour each day for aptitude section.It is more than enough for the aptitude section to give this much time..
