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Check out Tips To Success IV

Some minor topics like ecosystem, applied ecology, conservation biology, habitat and niche concept, population ecology are part of zoology course. So you can either leave it if you aren’t a zoology student or you can refer to them from the reference book that I have mentioned. You may also use a NCERT textbook for this. Just go through the main topics. There is no need to study this in detail and waste time.

For the microbiology students, environmental microbiology is important. So study whatever you have done in your bachelors and masters. That will cover up enough of the above topics. Population succession and microbial interactions (for e.g., commensalism, mutualism, neutralism, amenasalism, predation etc.) are important. From industrial microbiology, make a chart of your own with one column enlisting the names of the various commercially important microbes and the other column enlisting the commercially important enzymes they make. Any other chapter, in case I have forgotten to mention here, in your course should be well prepared.

Please note that that syllabus of CSIR NET is stupendously vast. Anyone who has appeared for this test will be able to tell you how vast this is and therefore, it is just impossible to cover every minute topic in the syllabus. It is an exam for all the streams in Biological Science. So the senate prepares the question paper with the fact in mind that students from different backgrounds will be appearing for the exam. Hence, one cannot be partial and set questions pertaining to only one stream. Thus, it is our responsibility and cleverness to tackle this problem. So the only tip I can give you all is that whatever stream you may belong to, cover your entire syllabus first. Do not leave out even a single chapter, unless you find it as a less important one which does not appear in the exams (usually). After you have done that, you go on to extend your coverage to a little bit of every other stream especially zoology and botany. If you follow what I have done during my time, that will be sufficient for you to cover up these two streams adequately.

Coming to Section A, the aptitude part. Well, for this I solved the previous year questions and the sample papers and mock tests available on the internet. You can selectively practise those chapters from your class 10^th and 12^th mathematics textbook. Beyond that point, you cannot do anything. This section basically judges your inherent ability to solve maths and puzzles, which you cannot improvise on much without large amount of practice – for which a month or two is not sufficient if you have to cover the massive biology syllabus as well.

Hope my advice becomes of some use to you 🙂