The Quantitative Ability (QA) section is the third section in the CAT exam, administered after the Verbal Ability & Reading Comprehension (VARC) and the Data Interpretation & Logical Reasoning (DILR) sections. This section consists of questions mostly from Arithmetic and concepts like Geometry, Numbers, Algebra, Indices & Surds, and Logarithms along with a few questions from pure maths topics of Coordinate Geometry, Trigonometry, Probability, Permutations & Combinations and so on.

While the long list of topics may not be very appealing to students from non-Math backgrounds, what would put their minds at ease is the fact that the questions in this section would be from school-level syllabus, especially from the syllabus taught in Classes VI to X, including a few questions from Classes XI and XII too.

It's all about data
The world is driven by information, which, in turn, is driven by data. One needs to make use of data in business to draw inferences and thereby, decisions. It is essential that business managers have the ability to make sense of the data in businesses, which in most cases, would be number based.

The importance of Quantitative Ability stems from this requirement.
Add to it the fact that one’s ability with numbers also reflects their ability to use logic and thinking, and we are required to test aspiring business managers on this.

Lo and behold, we have the QA as a testing area in management entrance exams. Across the world, while there are many management entrance exams, the area that gets invariably tested in all these exams is QA.