<p>I don't think you need to read in the classical sense to do well on SAT CR. The girl in my english class who read every book assiduously, wrote "beautiful" essays on what she read, and in addition read books for fun scored a 700 reading. Respectable, but not as good as my 760. I never read books (even required for school -- I sparknotes), never read word lists, and basically only ever read SAT passages to prepare.</p>
<p>So, yeah, just do practice tests. At this stage, you don't have time to read novels.</p>
<p>yes, but ashraf, you may be a naturally better test-taker than your friend. With her test-taking skills, but no reading, you might've made a 550.</p>
<p>If you think strategy is your issue, then take more practice tests, and try to figure out what you did right when you were able to eliminate some choices and answer right, versus when you were able to eliminate some choices but answered wrong.</p>
<p>Since the reading passages are short, I've noticed that on the Parents forum, many suggest reading newspapers and magazines, rather than books -- especially if reading books is not a passion. You need to read...and it's easier to get through magazine articles than classic literature. The daily New York Times, the Sunday New York Times magazine, and the articles in New Yorker Magazine seem to be among the most suggested. (Newsweek, Time and many local papers don't use the vocabulary and sentence structure required to actually increase your knowledge much above 6th grade reading level....)</p>
<p>The answer is practice. I rose my CR score from a 660 to an 800 in about 2 months. I got a bunch of review books and pretty much ignored Math and Writing (I was scoring well there), and just focused on CR. Since 1 test takes like 3.75 hrs - if you only do the CR in the book it should only take about 1hr. Go over the corrections in depth and find out why you miss the problems. Reading magazines is useful, but it won't help you figure CR out quickly. Intensive practice is the way to go. Secondly, don't memorize vocabulary, understand vocabulary. There is no way you're going to learn every single word: this is one thing that I figured out early on. Really, if you understand how the questions work, you can figure out most of the 18 questions. There, you should be aiming not to miss any, that way you'll have more leeway on the actual reading later on.</p>
<p>This is what I mean about not memorizing: you can learn 10,000 new words, but if the word verisimilitude shows up, 98% of people miss it. However, using roots and prefixes, you can break words down into veri - meaning truth, simi- meaning similar or same, and tude - meaning of or related to. Thus, the word vaguely means how similar something is to the truth, or original. That word showed up on a practice test I did, but I was able to get it because rather than spending precious time trying to learn all the words, I spent my time trying to understand them. </p>
<p>On the actual reading part there are tons of tricks to use, I learned a whole lot from the review books I bought. Try that, and I'm sure your score will increase.</p>