Critical Reading Workbook for the SAT Critical Reading Workbook for the Sat

Customer Reviews

Barron's provides excellent preparation materials

2008-09-29
I teach SAT prep/review classes independently, and have been using the Barron's workbook for several years. The material is challenging, and provides students with a large number of high-frequency SAT words used in context. The vocabulary lists, root origins of words, and practice tests are all excellent.
Kate Connors,
Holliston MA

Verbal SAT workbook

2008-09-12
This is good but it's almost exactly the same as SAT Critical Reading. No need to buy both. The Verbal SAT book is better as it has a grammar section.

Good book to have

2008-09-09
I get 200 point more at self SAT exam,after I did all problems in this book.

Excellent practice tests and vocabulary

2008-09-01
Obviously, this book can not be your only guide to the SAT;it only covers a third of it. But it does a very thorough job with the Critical Reading section. The sentence completion practice tests (4 tests per set, 3 different difficulty level sets) are very close to the real College Board ones. The reading comprehension pieces are decent; nothing amazing, but as good as close to the real SAT as you can find.

The most valuable part of this book (for the average person), is the comprehensive vocabulary list. It consists of 800 words (80 sets of 10 words). Being very familiar with the actual SAT, I can say that the words on the list are indeed very high-frequency SAT words. If you know every word on that list it would be hard to answer more than 2 sentence completion questions incorrectly on the real SAT. For the vocabulary list alone, the book is worth the buy.

SAT Practice works

2008-06-28
The work books provide the extra practice needed to improve preparedness for the SAT. As a supplement for the SAT guide they are very valuable.

It helped me

2008-03-21
Concentrating on the Critical Reading section of the newly structured SAT college entrance exam, this test-preparation workbook presents tips, questions, answers, and answer explanations for the section’s two main question types—sentence completion questions and reading comprehension questions—as well as extensive vocabulary review. Both the sentence completion and the reading comprehension exercises are organized according to level of difficulty and presented in three sections, labeled from A to C. Students who master Level C in both parts are well on the road to achieving a high Critical Reading score when they take the actual SAT. This new workbook replaces Barron's Verbal Workbook for the New SAT, 11th Edition.

Comprehensive and Well-written Resource

2007-01-17
This book is great! It has several practice passages, and the questions are really good. They adhere to the SAT format, and the answer choices are challenging, yet fair. The additional sentence completion exercises and prefix and root sections are really useful in SAT preparation. The only drawback to this book is that it uses many of the same sentence completion questions that you will see in their other test books, namely the Verbal Workbook for the SAT and the GRE test prep book. Other than that, the book is excellent.

So good I buy the Barron's SAT books all the way from Australia

2006-08-09
I'm an after-school tutor, and teach general English to Aussie school students. I use all the Barron's SAT workbooks to help improve the students' vocabulary, writing, comprehension and reading. This "Critical Reading Workbook" is great, with plenty of practice in sentence completion, comprehension questions and vocabulary extension. The practice exams at the back of the book are excellent for mastering exam technique, and the explanation section for the answers is very helpful. English is never taught this way in Australia, but it should be. All my students feel they learn more from studying one Barron's workbook than they do from doing a whole year of English lessons at school.

It has everything it's supposed to: not too much nor too little

2005-12-26
A very adequate Book!

This book covers various types of questions for the Reading sectoin and the Writing section. It has lots and lots of practice for reading section but could have more for writing (the practice tests on the back can cover that).

It breaks down the reading section into two sections for each type of questions: Sentence completion and Reading. It has all the information you need for each section and tons of practice questions for you to improve your skills.

Writing section is analyzed with many questions that contain the most common types of grammatical errors that are tested on the test. If you learn all those types and practice with the practice tests, you should do fairly well on the test.

For the essay part, it gives bunch of useful tips along with some sample essays with grader's comments.
This book also has the SAT High-frequency word list with 800 words that frequently appear on the SAT.

It doesn't have any useless information so doesn't overprepare you. It has just everything a SAT verbal workbook should have. Therefore, I highly recommend this book to everyone.

Other Books:
Princeton Review's Reading and Writing workbook is very short and inadequate. I wouldn't recommend it.
Kaplan's SAT reading workbook has tons of problems and so that book's pretty good.
Kaplan's SAT Writing workbook isn't as thorough as Barron's but it's good enough to give it a try.
For studying SAT overall I would strongly recommend the Maximum SAT which is the best SAT prep Book I have seen. It is really helpful to study along with the Official SAT Study Guide by collegeboard.