<p>Hello people,</p>
<p>I took the test a day before and literally screwed it up. I ran short of time in a Math section ( had to omit 4 questions ) and a CR section. I think I did pretty good on the essay.Examples include Harry Potter, an operation in life of Prime Minister of India(real) and an imaginary one. I filled up both the pages and (hopefully) didn't do any grammar mistake.</p>
<p>If anybody took this test, I was unable to comprehend the passage about Venice. Also, I'm not a native English speaker.</p>
<p>I've started working on my vocab (will be reading Direct Hits fast review every night before going to sleep; will this work?). I'm planning to take the October test now since I don't think I can do anything substantial to increase my score in a month.</p>
<p>I've started reading Sherlock Holmes. I sit with dictionary (my phone) and check out every new word (new word:the frequency of this showing up is too high, like 10 in a paragraph). I'm done reading <code>A study in scarlet</code> and will start with <code>A sign of four</code> today. I'm a little skeptic if I should read Sherlock Holmes as it's written in British English (I guess).</p>
<p>What books should I read? And how should I work on the lot of new words I find when reading them?</p>
<p>I wish to get ~2200 and aim to get into Carnegie Mellon (have some great computer programming related ECs).</p>
<p>Thank you,all.</p>
<p>bump… help needed badly… really</p>
<p>I’m sure you know this but I’ll just remind you that 4 omits on math immediately bunks you down to a 700. If you’re going into a computer program related major it looks kind of iffy if you don’t have a 750+ in the math section.</p>
<p>The Venice passage was experimental so there’s probably a reason why you couldn’t understand it as well (I was pretty dumbfounded myself, and I’m a native speaker who usually does well on dual passages.) In writing your english sounds just about as fluent as any native speaker; had you not stated otherwise I wouldn’t have guessed. </p>
<p>British english books from the victorian/modern era might actually be better at times because I’ve noticed words from those books tend to appear in CR vocabulary questions quite often. Honestly speaking though, reading a lot of books in the short term as opposed to the long term (the long term being your whole life) won’t help much on sat passages. I think it’s honestly better to just keep going over practice tests from the blue book. If you can’t seem to raise it even then try using guides like Silverturtle’s SAT guide found on this forum. If there are any notable sat prep classes around your area you might want to test some out over the summer. And vocab is pretty fun to learn after you get the hang of things, and direct hits seems to be where collegeboard is taking a lot of their words these days.</p>