The Bottom line...

<p>When it comes to the Critical reading section of the SAT, the only way you will be able to do good on it is if you have a large vocabulary. All these strategies we see in workbooks like the Big Blue book or barrons or kaplans or w/e are useless for any question if we do not know the word's in those questions. A high vocabulary is the only way and frankly its too late for me to read 100's of books to increase my vocabulary. thoughts?</p>

<p>i think it's less about knowing the words than it is about being able to deduce meaning from context.</p>

<p>Not really. I didn't have a wonderful range of vocabulary but I still did okay for critical reading section.</p>

<p>Really? Thats actually good news for me. If you dont mind me asking edwinksl, what was your CR score?</p>

<p>@jimbob: Do you mean get a feel for what the sentence is asking? B/c I dont exactly understand what you mean by "educe meaning from context". Sorry :(</p>

<p>Haha, 750.</p>

<p>don't be sorry!!
well i'm talking about guessing what a word means from the other words surrounding it. i guess this wouldn't work if you were doing sentence completions--because those actually test vocab knowledge</p>

<p>i do think that vocab lists can help you. i have a pretty decent vocabulary myself, but when i looked over the lists i recognized some words that pop up on tests all the time</p>

<p>What I did was to read a few books and diligently look up the meanings of words that I didn't know.</p>

<p>750 is an excellent score, not an "okay" one.</p>

<p>what are some good lists of common vocab words that show up?</p>