| Graduate Record Exam test takers who feel the need for extra help with math will value this brand-new workbook. Opening chapters present a general description of the GRE's General Math Exam, explaining its structure, questions types, and scoring, and advising on strategies for problem solving. Following chapters present detailed practice and review with hundreds of problems and solutions that focus on numbers and number theory, algebra, data analysis, and geometry. The workbook concludes with two full-length math sample sections followed by explained answers. |
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 A Solid Math Supplement With a Few Typos |
| Review Date: August 28, 2009 |
| Reviewer: D. G GREENE, |
If you are like me then you are not going to purchase just one book to prepare for the GRE, but you are likely going to work through several books from a variety of companies. As I write this, I have already worked through Kaplan's GRE Premier Edition and Princeton Review's How to Crack the GRE for the general idea of the test, and now I am turning my attention to the subject specific GRE books for further refinement. Barron's GRE Math Workbook was first on my list of such books, and I am happy to report that despite a few typos this book is well worth the time and the energy to work through it.
The two general review books I mentioned above from Kaplan and Princeton Review focused mainly on how to identify trick questions or how to implement peculiar strategies, such as dumping the possible answer choices back into the question statement to find the answer, rather than satisfactorily reviewing the math you are supposed to know to solve the problems directly. The great thing about the GRE Math Workbook is that it reviews the math directly while at the same time it introduces you to problem specific tricks that will help you solve problems faster. It does this by first focusing on the straightforward way to solve certain math problems, and then it adds in the tricks once you have already reviewed the basics. At the end of each small section you are given a small quiz of about 8 fairly straightforward problems to solve. These make sure you grasp the basic math concepts. These problems are usually followed by about 10 GRE level problems that use the same math, but are now a bit trickier to solve. I have found the format works well for the most part, with the only criticisms being that some of the more obscure topics (such as permutations and combinations) were left out and that the problems as a whole seemed a bit too easy in most sections (but maybe this just means that I am getting better at solving them?).
A lot of the tricks introduced in this book are very useful. They really helped me solve certain types of problems that I was still having trouble with even after working completely through the other two books. For example, I have never seen any other book mention that you can factor an exponential number such as 10^8 into two terms such as (2x5)^8 which then distributes to (2^8)(5^8). Now that I know that this is an option I use it all the time to cancel quantitative comp questions that deal with large exponents. These problems I was really struggling with before reading this book; I used to have to resort to multiplying things out to get the answer which simply wasted a lot of precious time. Example problems always follow each new idea that is introduced, so you can immediately see how some of these strange new approaches to math can be applied to solve a GRE question.
The only major gripe is that a few typos pop up here and there throughout the book as you work through it. These are usually related to the wrong symbols being placed in between numbers, and they very rarely affect the final answers. For that reason the mistakes are usually very easy to spot, or at least they are if you are indeed merely reviewing a subject that you already have studied which I assume to be the case. They will not really confuse you much if you think about the context clues. For example, on page 24, it tells you that an example of multiplication is 3+4=12 where 3 and 4 are factors and 12 is the product. It is easy to spot that what they meant was for a multiplication sign to be between the 3 and the 4. It certainly appears sloppy whenever you find these typos, and at times it might even cause you to laugh (as was the case on page 64 where the author solved the same problem twice and got two different answers thanks to a typo in his second approach). Thankfully, the answer choices for the problem questions and problem examples appear to have been more carefully proofread. I am currently almost done working through the book (I am on pg. 202 at the moment), and so far I have only found one problem where I wasn't able to choose the right answer out of the available choices due to a typo (pg. 114, #14 should have a 3 next to the root for choice B), and I have yet to find a problem where the letter for the answer in the solutions section was wrong (though the written explanations for the answers have had a few typos here and there along the lines of those described above).
In the end the typos do spoil the fun a bit, but the math in this book is still solid and the techniques involved are useful and different enough to recommend this as a supplement for serious students who plan to work through multiple books when preparing for the GRE. I wish companies would spend more time ironing out these typos before releasing their books, but to be honest, in the time between when I started buying these cheap academic science and math help books in 2002 to the present, I have seen the number of typos in books of this type skyrocket from all the companies involved. For instance, the early Dummies books I have (such as Calculus for Dummies and Chemistry for Dummies) have very few errors in them whereas recent books I have purchased in the Dummies series (Quantum Physics and Biochemistry) are simply loaded with typos to the point where these books are unreadable at times. I don't know if it is a side effect of a situation where so many more companies are now competing with each other in the academic help book market that companies feel that they have to rush things out to get ahead of the other guy or what, but it is a little disappointing to see a great help book become merely a very good one simply because it was rushed out with a bunch of careless typos in it. Such was the case here.
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barrongremath
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| Review Date: September 19, 2009 |
| Reviewer: L. Lou, |
| I last took the GRE in college but haven't been working with numbers since then. I needed an overall review. I found the book pretty useful in reviewing the basic concepts, especially the chapter on geometry. But I have to say there are unnecessary errors in the book that can be distracting. The book doesn't cover everything and there probably isn't one GRE book that will do that. |
Needs more editing
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| Review Date: September 4, 2009 |
| Reviewer: Becky Tsang, sf |
Nothing annoys me more than working on a problem for 15 minutes, being completely frustrated at not being able to get the answer, and then looking at the answer guide in the back to find that a.) the numbers in the answers & practice problems don't match or b.) the answer they list in the front is not the answer they list in the back.
Seriously, did anyone work on these problems? They're pretty glaring. And I'm only in the third chapter.
The problems that they don't screw up on aren't bad. |
Middle School status
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| Review Date: November 13, 2009 |
| Reviewer: D. Boiano, Los Angeles, CA |
| The Math Workbook is okay. The teaching style is very much like middle school math. Certain things are not really explained at all, while other things that are absolutely a given are fully described. There are also a bunch of typo's in the book which are a little distracting, but it's obvious that they are typo's and shouldn't teach you incorrectly. I wonder who edits these books. Overall it does the job for the price. |
don't bother
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| Review Date: December 27, 2009 |
| Reviewer: mercury retrograde, |
Lousy with typos. It's like they didn't even edit it. You've got enough headaches, right?
Poorly organized.
Answers to exercise questions difficult to locate, poorly labelled. |
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