Product Description

* NEW! Details and practice for the new question type

* Hundreds of test-like practice questions

* Detailed answer explanations

* Proven score-raising strategies

* Tactics for solving all question types

* Review of core math concepts

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #182115 in Books
• Published on: 2007-09-04
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 352 pages

About the Author
Kaplan Publishing is one of the nation's top publishers of academic and professional development resources. We publish titles on topics such as test preparation, college and graduate school admissions, academic and career development in the legal, medical, education, and general business fields. Kaplan Publishing is the leading provider of test prep materials for a variety of standardized tests, including the GRE, GMAT, LSAT, SAT, PSAT, MCAT, TOEFL, and more.

Our mission is to help individuals achieve their educational and career goals. We build futures one success story at a time.

Customer Reviews

Good basic math review
This book offers a good overview of the math tested on the GRE General Test. It's essentially an overview of math concepts learned in high school - but this is the level of math tested on the general test. (Only the GRE Math Subject Test tests more advanced concepts like calculus.) If you are like me and have not taken any sort of math class in years and would like a refresher in Algebra and Geometry to prepare for the GRE General Test, then this book is a good place to start.

It provides overviews of the concepts - including how to apply them to the specific kinds of questions you will see on the GRE - and there are lots of practice problems, which are divided into beginner, intermediate, and advanced levels so you can focus on the level you're at in each section. The difficulty levels of the problems are comparable to the difficulty levels of the practice problems you can download from the ETS site itself. (The main difference is that the Kaplan book offers many more practice problems.)

However, if you already have a solid understanding of high school level math concepts, then even the most advanced problems in this book will seem easy. The Barron's "How to Prepare for the GRE" book is a much better book for practicing difficult math problems and upping your chances for an 800 in math. Overall, the Kaplan math workbook offers more practice problems than any other study resource I came across and is a great place to start if you're not already at the advanced level in math. It's also sufficient enough to use as your only math preparation if you're not aiming for the 800 level.

Use this book for astounding results!
I bought this book in an attempt to review high school math concepts that I hadn't used in over a decade. It far exceeded my expectations. There are chapters for basic review of each of the math concepts tested on the GRE--and most helpful, at the end of the book, there are 3 chapters that combine all the concepts into problem solving questions exactly like those that are likely to appear on the test iteself. Furthermore, the explanations are clear and easy to understand. I took the GRE last week and was stunned when I saw my math scores. I have already recommended this book to friends who are long out of high school!

Shouldn't have started with this...
This book didn't really work for me. One of the things that frustrated me most was that the information provided in the chapters (which is really long and which I read all of) didn't prepare me much at all for the practice questions/tests or for the questions I saw on the actual GRE. I spent practically all of my allotted study time reading these long chapters thinking they would fill me in on what I don't know about math (which is a lot), but really they just cover the most basic things in the GRE-impractical order of theme (arithmetic, algebra, geometry), without giving you a clue how to decide what skills to use on the more complex problems of the GRE (fine, I understand how to use FOIL, but I have no idea how to figure out when to use it on the test). Another problem is that the explanations in the answer key are hard to understand (the jump between the difficulty level of the chapter information and the problems/explanations in most of the chapters is so great it seems like they weren't written together at all), and there are also mistakes in the answer key (#7 in the lines and angles test, for example). I also found it annoying that the author of the chapters seems more concerned with providing his/her version of a solid background in basic GRE-level math than with actually preparing us for the test (for example, insisting on using math terms instead of plain English in situations where plain English would work just as well, or including unnecessary information - on page 35, "you'll never actually have to calculate the standard deviation on test day, but here's how it's calculated...," etc.). In retrospect, I really wish I had started with the free GRE Powerprep software and its Math Review, which is a 69-page free pdp file. What I used of Kaplan's Premier Edition book/CD also seemed pretty good. Maybe after all of that, if I'd had months to study, the difficult practice questions in this math workbook could have been handy. Reading it from the beginning like I did, though, was a terrible waste of my time.