If you need intensive practice to build a mighty word arsenal, you can sign up for Mentaurs Vocabulary Pro, a powerful tool that will teach you more than 1,200 essential advanced words as it takes you on a tour of key concepts in the various fields from which GRE and SAT reading passages are frequently taken. Your learning will be reinforced by matching exercises and your progress tracked with the Word Bank function.

College-bound students will find intensive test-taking practice for the all- important SAT in this brand-new book.

• Six full-length practice exams similar in length, structure, question types and degree of difficulty to the actual SAT
• All questions answered and explained
• Includes self-appraisal information for scoring the SAT essay question
• Extra features include test-taking tips and strategies to help students maximize their scores

Essential Words for the GRE teaches 800 advanced words that frequently appear on the GRE. Each word has been carefully selected through reference to published GRE lists and on the basis of the author’s many years of experience in preparing students for the test. These 800 words also appear on the Master Word List and the High-Frequency Word List in Barron’s How to Prepare for the GRE.

The educational philosophy behind Essential Words for the GRE is straight-forward: The best way to learn new words is to see how they are used in complex sentences and do regular exercises involving similar sentences. Students benefit the most by practicing on exercise material similar in type and level to the material that will appear on the test for which they are preparing. Exercises consisting of sentences similar in content, structure, and level of difficulty give students the opportunity to improve their vocabulary using exercises very similar to those appearing on the actual GRE.

The use of academic sentences in Essential Words for the GRE is in line with the new format of the GRE. Practicing on such material has the added advantage that it will improve your skills in understanding complex sentences and arguments. Another benefit is that it will increase your familiarity with important ideas that appear on the GRE.

Serious students preparing for the Verbal Reasoning section of the GRE General Test know that the best way to prepare is to do exercises similar to those that appear on the actual test, and they are always looking for high-quality practice exercises. However, there is a shortage of such material. Therefore, Philip Geer wrote Barron’s GRE Verbal Workbook. This workbook offers three complete verbal reasoning tests and extensive practice on each type of question that appears on the test, so that students will have the skills to do well. Each answer is clearly explained, ensuring that students will easily understand why it is correct.

The revised GRE General Test requires a greater number of high order reasoning skills than the past test, so quite demanding reading passages on a wide variety of topics with correspondingly more difficult questions on them have been included. Thus, after students complete the book they will not only have improved their comprehension and other verbal skills, they will also have become comfortable with a range of topics in the arts and sciences. This is important because the test makers say that “reading passages are drawn from many different disciplines and sources.” In addition, the sentence equivalence and text completion exercises are written so that they develop high order thinking skills as they provide useful information about a range of topics.

A feature of this book is the GRE Dictionary, which gives definitions of words likely to appear on the test, as well as a brief sentence illustrating how each word is used. Difficult words used in this book are defined, so students can efficiently expand their vocabulary as they work through the exercises.

In Wordfest author Philip Geer has incorporated what he has learned about vocabulary development during his thirty years of teaching. One of this book’s main premises is that students learn words most effectively when the words appear in meaningful and realistic contexts. Wordfest therefore takes an intellectual approach, teaching words in the context of rather complex sentences (such as those that appear on the new SAT) about ideas and issues in the arts, sciences, and social sciences. This approach has the additional advantage of acquainting students with important concepts in the various fields of knowledge. Designed to teach a wide range of important ideas in the arts (existentialism and surrealism, for example), science (plate tectonics and vivisection, for example), and social sciences (apartheid and sociobiology, for example), Wordfest provides a useful review of many of the terms students have covered in English, history, and other high school subjects.

The other important premise of the book is that vocabulary learning must be reinforced through repetition and systematic exercises. Thus, words taught in earlier units reappear regularly in subsequent units and exercises are provided to ensure that the words are learned. Periodic review exercises further reinforce learning.

Each unit of Wordfest contains a section called Fine-Tuning that focuses on the correct use of the words and points out fine distinctions in meaning between similar words (secular, mundane, profane, temporal, for example). These sections also expand the student’s understanding of words through discussions of etymology and build up knowledge of the Latin and Greek roots of many words.

Wordfest is ideal for use by junior and seniors in high school, especially students preparing for the SAT, ACT, AP English Language and Composition, and AP English Literature and Composition. It can be used either as a supplement to existing vocabulary development programs or as the core component of such a program. One approach would be to use the first half of the book – The Foundation – in a junior year program and the second half of the book – The Advanced – in a senior year program.

The expanded new edition of this SAT test preparation aid employs humor to help students strengthen their vocabulary. It uses cartoons to focus on word meanings and their usage. 300 cartoon illustrations familiarize students with words they are almost certain to encounter when they take the SAT. Each cartoon's visual pun serves as a memory aid that relates to the target word's meaning. Every word-related cartoon includes both a definition and three sample sentences to demonstrate how the word is used in standard contexts. To reinforce memory retention, a set of SAT-style sentence completion exercises follows every group of 12 cartoons.

“Although the use of cartoons to teach vocabulary is not an original concept, this workbook is set apart by its addition of the sound link and its use of cartoons that are sophisticated and entertaining, often featuring puns to reinforce a word's meaning. The sentence completion exercises in the unit reviews make it a valuable tool for preparing the reader for the SAT. This workbook would be a good choice especially for students who are visual learners and for high school libraries.”
—Christine Sanderson, VOYA, April 2005

This set of vocabulary-building flash cards present cartoon illustrations showing visual puns with sample sentences and verbal mnemonics with definitions given on the reverse side of each card. Words and definitions are those that have appeared most frequently on recent SAT college entrance exams. The cartoons and vocabulary have been adapted from Philip and Susan Geer's book Picture These SAT Words!, which is also available from Barron's. 200 flash cards • 200 word-building cartoons

Research has demonstrated that to learn an unfamiliar word a person must see the word in different contexts. Simon’s Saga systematically uses 820 essential SAT words in realistic contexts. Read the story and improve your word knowledge! The newly revised second edition of this book literally takes a "novel" approach to building students' verbal skills as they prepare for their all-important college entrance test. Simon tells college-bound kids his story as he shows his readers around campus. In the process, he helps students develop their vocabulary and overall verbal fluency, virtually guaranteeing them a great SAT score. Simon talks about making new friends on campus, meeting girls and dating, doing library research, writing term papers, and lots more. As his story proceeds, new words for students to learn are printed in boldface type--the reader's signal to check word definitions and correct usage. All boldface words appear with meanings and cross-references in a glossary at the back of the book. Brand-new in this edition are the updated exercises that conclude every chapter. All questions have been changed to reflect the question types that appear on the latest version of the SAT. The new exercises present more than 100 SAT-type critical reading questions and more than 300 SAT-type sentence completion questions.