<p>Good evening College Confidential. </p>
<p>I'm an international student and I'm having a lot of struggles studying for the Critical Reading section. Probably because English isn't my first language.</p>
<p>Anyways, could any of you give me some tops of what should I do to study?</p>
<p>Right now, I've been doing:</p>
<p>501 Critical Reading Questions (Book)
Direct Hits (2011 Edition)</p>
<p>But I don't know if that will be sufficient enough. I also have "Barron's Critical Reading Workbook" (12th edition), but I don't see much help in there.
What can you guys advise me?</p>
<p>Also, some peole say I should read articles, newspapers, etc. Will that really, really help me?
Will readinh a National Geographic magazine help me?</p>
<p>My two major problems are:
1) I'm SLOW when it comes in this section
2) I doubt A LOT. I always narrow to 2 possible questions and I stay like 5 mins on one question trying to see which answer would fit. </p>
<p>Can anyone give me an advice on this? Thanks!</p>
<p>Something that will dramatically boost your Critical Reading score is really just acing the vocabulary section. Princeton Review’s prep book has a really good and fairly comprehensive list of vocabulary that shows up on the SAT. Vocab is also just memorization, so perfecting this section will really help your score as a non-native English speaker.</p>
<p>Another thing to keep in mind is that all questions, regardless of difficulty, are worth the same amount of points. There will be passages that are easier for you to read, and passages that are harder for you to read. Flip through the Critical Reading section at the beginning and pick out the passages that look easier for you to understand, then focus on answering those questions well instead of wasting time with harder passages where you may only get 50% of the questions right. </p>
<p>It’s also very important to MOVE ON!!! If you’re between two choices, do NOT spend extraneous time doubting yourself! Just pick a choice and move on, or just omit. Even if you pick wrong, just keep in mind that the SAT is largely a test of time. It will be much better for you to quickly move on to the next, easy-ranked question than to spend a quarter of your time on a single, hard-ranked question.</p>
<p>Other than all of this, it really would be best to just read some books and short stories in English. You are able to unconsciously pick up SO much from simple, leisure reading. I hope this helped you haha… GOOD LUCK :)</p>
<p>Wow that’s one great advice man!</p>
<p>Thanks! Yes, starting tomorrow I’ll star doing everything you are telling me to do! I’ll finish Direct Hits (there are 500 words in total, I think) and at the same time read english stuff.
I’ll also try to do 2-3 practice tests a week. </p>
<p>Also, what do you advie me on writing? I already did the SAT last year but I got 580 on Reading and 650 on Writing.
How can I improve writing?</p>
<p>And is doing each SAT section with 5 less minutes a good idea? Will that help me?</p>
<p>Thank you so much! :)</p>