Kaplan GRE Exam Verbal Workbook: Third Edition (Kaplan Gre Verbal Workbook)
Inc. Kaplan
Kaplan, 2004-07-27
Price: $17.00
ASIN: 0743241304 Keywords: Education, GRE, Nonfiction, Reference, Study Skills, Test Prep Central
Reviews:
Good Book!
I took my GRE in October and got 96% for Verbal. I think I owe it to this book (AND to Barron's Pass Key to the GRE). This book has a very helpful vocab list -- I especially like how they break down into which sets of words are most common, then next most common etc... I also found their analogies section and sentence completion section very helpful -- the 4 types of bridges idea for an analogy was next to revolutionary for me. Also learning that the answer choices for an analogy have to match the same order as the words in the analogy. I lived 27 years and NEVER knew that, I don't know how many times I've gotten questions wrong from having the correct relationship there but the answer words in the wrong order.
The other sections I didn't find too helpful, the reading comp. And their section on building your vocab starts with something like "read your whole life" haha, that was meaningless.
I don't recommend
The condition of the book was good, however I can not say the same thing for the content. Writing exercises are not really heplful and other exercises are almost the same as the writing part. I do not recomend this book.
not bad, i liked the exercises
This book was useful if you need a broad overview, and I like their layout better than Barrons. But basically they contain mostly the same info at least on the verbal part. If you have lots of time and want to work through everything in this book, you could certainly learn alot of vocab. And they have some good tips as well.
Incorrect answers
This book features answers that are just plain wrong! The GRE tests subtleties of words and phrases and this book ignores them. If you can pick up with book used somewhere, I suppose it is good for basic practice, but don't count on it for your main method of review.
It is just waste of $$$!
This book is not helpful at all. The definitions of some vocabularies are not exact, they can give some sort of confusion to the test takers. Even though this book provides some good groups of similar vocabularies, it is not that useful also because modern tendency of GRE is asking more the exact meaning of a vocabulary. It would be better to study the detail and exact definitions of vocabularies through some good dictionaries.
The other sections I didn't find too helpful, the reading comp. And their section on building your vocab starts with something like "read your whole life" haha, that was meaningless.