<p>How is the CR section? I wanna buy it today.</p>
<p>I think the CR section is pretty good, but CR is kind of difficult to really prep for. For the sentence completion section, all it basically says is "Know your vocabulary" but the strategies for long-passage reading are good, they give you tips one how to maintain focus and such. I would say buy it since it has tons of strategies and you never know what will work for you. But their sample questions are definitely more difficult.</p>
<p>schrizto-- hahaha.</p>
<p>I think the CR section in Barron's 2400 is pretty good... that's the part I'm doing now. I'm mostly just using the practice sections though (which seem relatively comparable to the blue book ones), because I don't have the patience to sift through their pages and pages long tips and strategies. They'll just say, "Hey! Are you a visual learner? If so, check this out!" And then they'll give you some long thing like</p>
<p>C
R
I
T
I
C
A
L</p>
<p>R
E
A
D
I
N
G</p>
<p>S
T
R
A
T
E
G
Y</p>
<p>and for each letter, give some weird-ass thing like "Delve into higher-order thinking questions last" for D. They claim that on test day, you will be able to "call up the picture" of the acronym and that will help you out <em>rolls eyes</em></p>
<p>But don't discount it because of me; that might be your type of thing :D</p>
<p>Hahaha..thecomisar, those are my thoughts exactly! I love how some of their strategies are to "Narrow in on the best answer choice" or "Pare down the answer choices." No, really? But I guess it would work for the "visual learners" out there..</p>
<p>And I think it's funny how they claim to not give you the obvious strategies, only higher-level ones, and then every other thing they say is "Don't forget about the process of elimination!" I mean REALLY. Do they think we've never heard about that one??</p>
<p>Except that they don't even call it process of elimination...it's PET! But I probably shouldn't make fun of them too much, since they'll probably get me a pretty good score.</p>
<p>it is the book author's assumption that their audience is a complete bunch of bufoons .. =P</p>
<p>Then why do they say the book is directed at "academic high achievers" then?</p>
<p>No, the “strategies” that they offer are basic common sense. As a person from third world country, the hardest part for me is the CR section, and the advice they offer is “locate context clue”, or “say sentence to yourself to see if it makes sense”, “don’t do guesswork”. Yeah, thanks Sherlock. Seriously though, they seem to believe that we know what each word means and still manage to mess things up. No that’s not how it works, that’s not how any of that works. If I’m doing guesswork it means I’m doing it as my last resort. The trick is to have a strong vocabulary, and how do you get strong vocabulary? Well Hurr-Durr. Write the questions, write down unknown words and learn them. Tackling the word lists isn’t a good idea. So the strategies that they offer for “academic high achievers” is full of ■■■■. </p>
<p>Having said that, I appreciated the the practice questions. They were good, and the explanations were easy to follow. You want a high score, practice more, solve more questions. Read books in English to build vocabulary etc. etc. </p>