CSAT consists of two compulsory objective papers - General Studies paper and the Aptitude paper. Given below are the strategies to tackle these papers in the best possible manner.
Paper first being the General Studies consists of familiar areas like Current events of national and international importance, History of India and Indian National Movement, Indian and World Geography, Indian Polity and Governance, Economic and Social Development, General Science and General issues on Environmental ecology, Bio-diversity and Climate Change. The students should pay special attention to the Environment topic and governance portion as these are the newly added topics and the number of questions from these sections will increase in the coming years.

Candidates would do well by going through the class XI and XII NCERT biology books which has some of the chapters on Environment. For rest of the portions, general recommended books can be consulted.
Paper-II is the aptitude paper having topics like Comprehension, Logical reasoning and analytical ability, Interpersonal skills including communication skills, Decision making and problem solving, General mental ability, Basic numeracy, Data interpretation, and English Language Comprehension skills.

Here it is important to make a distinction between Comprehension and English Language Comprehension.
Comprehension section tests the comprehension knowledge of the student so it will be both in English and Hindi.
Questions relating to English Language Comprehension skills will be tested through passages from English language only without providing Hindi translation thereof in the question paper. This passage is relatively easier than the passage falling under the comprehension section as it merely intends to check the basic English language skill. The students should in no case leave or miss these passages in a hurry to complete any other section as it is easier to score well in these passages. A general and sound advice for Paper-II is regular practice even if it is only two hours every day.

Decision-making and Problem-solving :
This section measures a candidate’s ability to take a decision based on given set of conditions and information. The questions will generally relate to situations that require you either to take some action, to explain why an action should be taken or infer what the action implies. This will also need a certain reading between the lines and fine tuning the difference of a hint and an assumption.
Questions based on real life law, and order situations or administrative stalemate and the ethical and moral basis of decision making are an integral component of this area.
Questions can range from basic reasoning problems to intricate caselets (short case studies) to check a candidate’s ability to take a technically sound decision under a proclivity to ethics.
Reasoning is the ability to correlate information properly and reach a technically correct conclusion on the basis of rules. Logic is the science of valid or right reasoning. So, we need to learn the rules of logic before we apply them to a particular argument, making it necessary to understand the correct meaning of an argument and to understand the implied meaning of that argument. In other words, understanding the obvious and the implied meanings of the sentences is the basic requisite for understanding the arguments properly.
In order to test this type of reasoning, different types of questions are designed or formatted. It is to check whether a particular person is able to not only argue properly but decipher any fallacies in arguments being presented. The faculty to argue, orrationalize is a positive and desirable quality, particularly in IAS officers, because they are supposed to take decisions which will affect the affect the lives of a large number of people.

General Mental Ability :
An area which has been separated from the General Studies paper of the old pattern, General Mental Ability (GMA) is now a part of CSAT Paper II.
General Mental Ability verifies a candidate’s cognitive skills. From a student’s perspective GMA, as a subject, does not require any formal learning of subject specific rules but an exposure of possible question types and finding your own way to handle tricky questions, where you tend to make mistakes, can help you get an impeccable score.
The questions check the common sense clubbed with the basic mathematics skills that one is exposed to, till class Xth, a competency that will impact on job performance, irrespective of the cadre one selects.
GMA can test for Verbal and Non-Verbal Reasoning skills. Questions can be based on coding-decoding, ages, relations, Venn diagrams, sets, dices, direction sense, abstract figures, logical number/alphabetical/ diagrammatic sequences, etc. So the way to gain proficiency at GMA is to get a wide exposure of all possible question types and have a perfectionist’s attitude. If you get a single question wrong, then that question is important for you, as it possibly has something that you need to learn.

Basic Numeracy and Data Interpretation:
This section covers topics related to numbers and their relations, order of magnitude etc., data interpretation, which covers questions based on data analysis.
The data can be represented in different forms such as tables, graphs, charts etc. and Data Sufficiency, where one just has to check the sufficiency of data for the question asked. It measures the numerical ability and accuracy in mathematical calculations. The questions range from purely numeric calculations to problems of arithmetical reasoning, graph and table reading, percentage analysis and quantitative analysis. In this we require more reasoning ability to solve mathematical problems than pure mathematics itself. As a whole, the students are tested for their sharpness to analyze the given data in a short span of time.